Fluorescent assay for alkaline phosphatase activity based on graphene oxide integrating with λ exonuclease

A novel fluorescence turn-on strategy for the alkaline phosphatase (ALP) assay is developed based on the preferential binding of graphene oxide (GO) to single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) over double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) coupled with λ exonuclease (λ exo) cleavage. Specifically, in the absence of ALP, the substrate-dsDNA constructed by one oligonucleotide with a fluorophore at the 3'-end (F-DNA) and its complementary sequence modified with a 5'-phosphoryl termini (p-DNA), is promptly cleaved by λ exo, and the resulting F-DNA is adsorbed on GO surface, allowing fluorescence quenching. Whereas the introduction of ALP leads to the hydrolysis of the P-DNA, and the yielding 5'-hydroxyl end product hampers the λ exo cleavage, inducing significant fluorescence enhancement due to the weak binding of dsDNA with GO. Under the optimized conditions, the approach exhibits high sensitivity and specificity to ALP with a detection limit of 0.19 U/L, and the determination of ALP in spiked human serum samples has also been realized. Notably, this new approach not only provides a novel and sensitive platform for the ALP activity detection but also promotes the exploitation of the GO-based biosensing for the detection of the protein with no specific binding element, and thus extending the GO-based sensing applications into a new field.