Recent advances in duplex-specific nuclease-based signal amplification strategies for microRNA detection

In recent years, miRNAs had emerged as promising biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis of the health-threatening diseases (e.g., cancers), which associated with a broad range of pathological and biological processes, including drug resistance, apoptosis, metastasis, and proliferation. Therefore, accurate detection of the levels of miRNA shown excellent prospects for early diagnosis of the health-threatening diseases. Considering that only trace miRNA existed in biological fluids, many newly developed biosensors for miRNA detection mainly focused on introducing various of signal amplification strategies for improving the detection sensitivity. Duplex-specific nuclease (DSN), a nuclease purified from hepatopancreas of Kamchatka crab, was capable of specifically cleaving double-stranded DNA or DNA in DNA-RNA heteroduplexes and was inactive toward single-stranded oligonucleotides or double-stranded RNA, endowing a possibility for construction of newly miRNA biosensors. Recently, many newly developed DSN-based biosensors architectures for miRNA analysis were reported. In this review, we explained the great potential of miRNAs as promising biomarkers by overviewing DSN-based signal amplification strategies for miRNA detection in the last decades.