An AIEgens and exonuclease Ⅲ aided quadratic amplification assay for detecting and cellular imaging of telomerase activity

• 来源期刊: 科学通报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（14）
• 页码范围: 997-1003
• 页数: 7页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Monitoring telomerase activity with high sensitive and reliable is of great importance to cancer analysis.In this paper,we report a sensitive and facile method to detect telomerase activity using AlEgens modified probe (TPE-Py-DNA) as a fluorescence reporter and exonuclease Ⅲ (Exo Ⅲ) as a signal amplifier.With the aid of telomerase,repeat units (TTAGGG)n are extended from the end of template substrate oligonucleotides (TS primer) that form duplex DNAs with TPE-Py-DNA.Then,Exo Ⅲ catalyzes the digestion of duplex DNAs,liberating elongation product and releasing hydrophobic TPE-Py.The released hydrophobic TPE-Py aggregate together and produce a telomerase-activity-related fluorescence signal.The liberated product hybridizes with another TPE-Py-DNA probe,starting the second cycle.Finally,we obtain the target-to-signal amplification ratio of 1 ∶N2.This strategy exhibits good performance for detecting clinical urine samples (distinguishing 15 cancer patients' samples from 8 healthy ones) and checking intracellular telomerase activity (differentiating cell lines including HeLa,MDA-MB-231,MCF-7,A375,HLF and MRC-5 from the cells pretreated with telomerase-related drug),which shows its potential in clinical diagnosis as well as therapeutic monitoring of cancer.