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Updated: Jun 26, 2025
Assembly of Gold Nanorods into Chiral Plasmonic Metamolecules Using DNA Origami Templates
Published on: March 5, 2019
A bioinspired heterostructured nanochannel based on dendrimer-gold network and aluminum oxide arrays for sensitive
Wenrui Ma1, Lulu Liu2, Zhuoya Jiang1
1Key Disciplines Lab of Novel Micro-Nano Devices and System Technology & Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Technology and Systems (Ministry of Education), School of Optoelectronic Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China; International R & D Center of Micro-nano Systems and New Materials Technology, Chongqing University, Shapingba, Chongqing, 400044, China.
Background:
MicroRNAs, as oncogenes or tumor suppressors, enable to up or down-regulate gene expression during tumorigenesis. The detection of miRNAs with high sensitivity is crucial for the early diagnosis of cancer. Inspired by biological ion channels, artificial nanochannels are considered as an excellent biosensing platform with relatively high sensitivity and stability. The current nanochannel biosensors are mainly based on homogeneous membranes, and their monotonous structure and functionality limit its further development. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a heterostructured nanochannel with high ionic current rectification to achieve highly sensitive miRNA detection.
Results:
In this work, an asymmetric heterostructured nanochannel constructed from dendrimer-gold nanoparticles network and anodic aluminum oxide are designed through an interfacial super-assembly method, which can regulate ion transport and achieve sensitive detection of target miRNA. The symmetry breaking is demonstrated to endow the heterostructured nanochannels with an outstanding ionic current rectification performance. Arising from the change of surface charges in the nanochannels triggered by DNA cascade signal amplification in solution, the proposed heterogeneous nanochannels exhibits excellent DNA-regulated ionic current response. Relying on the nucleic acid's hybridization and configuration transformation, the target miRNA-122 associated with liver cancer can be indirectly quantified with a detection limit of 1 fM and a wide dynamic range from 1 fM to 10 pM. The correlation fitting coefficient R2 of the calibration curve can reach to 0.996. The experimental results show that the method has a good recovery rate (98%-105 %) in synthetic samples.
Significance:
This study reveals how the surface charge density of nanochannels regulate the ionic current response in the heterostructured nanochannels. The designed heterogeneous nanochannels not only possess high ionic current rectification property, but also enable to induce superior transport performance by the variation of surface chemistry. The proposed biosensor is promising for applications in early diagnosis of cancers, life science research, and single-entity electrochemical detection.
