Strand-Exchange Nucleic Acid Circuitry with Enhanced Thermo-and Structure- Buffering Abilities Turns Gene Diagnostics...

Catalytic hairpin assembly (CHA) is one of the most promising nucleic acid amplification circuits based on toehold-mediated strand exchange reactions. But its performance is usually ruined by fluctuated environmental temperatures or unexpected self-structures existing in most real-world targets. Here we present an amide-assistant mechanism that successfully reduces the prevalence of these problems for CHA and maximizes its thermo- and structure- buffering abilities. Such an organic amide-promoted CHA (shortened as OHT-CHA) can unprecedentedly amplify through 4 °C to 60 °C without rebuilding sequences or concerning target complexity. We are then for the first time able to employ it as a direct and universal signal booster for loop mediated isothermal reaction (LAMP). LAMP is one of the most promising point-of-care (POC) gene amplifiers, but has been hard to detect precisely due to structured products and haunted off-target amplicons. OHT-CHA guarantees a significant and reliable signal for LAMP reaction amplified from as little as 10^-19 M virus gene. And one single set of OHT-CHA is qualified to any detection requirement, either in real-time at LAMP running temperature (~60 °C), or at end-point on a POC photon counter only holding environmental temperatures fluctuating between 4 °C to 42 °C.