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Updated: Apr 19, 2026
Design and Development of Aptamer–Gold Nanoparticle Based Colorimetric Assays for In-the-field Applications
Published on: June 23, 2016
Highly sensitive colorimetric detection of 17β-estradiol using split DNA aptamers immobilized on unmodified gold
Jinchuan Liu1, Wenhui Bai1, Shucao Niu1
11] Key Laboratory of Agro-product Quality and Safety, Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology for Agro-products, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, 100081, China [2] Key Laboratory of Agri-food Quality and Safety, Ministry of Agri-culture, Beijing, 100081, China.
Abstract:
Gold nanoparticle (AuNP) based colorimetric aptasensor have been developed for many analytes recently largely because of the ease of detection, high sensitivity, and potential for high-throughput analysis. Most of the target aptamers for detection have short sequences. However, the approach shows poor performance in terms of detection sensitivity for most of the long-sequence aptamers. To address this problem, for the first time, we split the 76 mer aptamer of 17β-estradiol into two short pieces to improve the AuNP based colorimetric sensitivity. Our results showed that the split P1 + P2 still retained the original 76 mer aptamer's affinity and specificity but increased the detection limit by 10-fold, demonstrating that as low as 0.1 ng/mL 17β-estradiol could be detected. The increased sensitivity may be caused by lower aptamer adsorption concentration and a lower affinity to the AuNPs of a short single-strand DNA (ssDNA) sequence. Our study provided a new way to use long-sequence aptamers to develop a highly sensitive AuNP-based colorimetric aptasensor.
