Sensitive and selective detection of microRNA in complex biological samples based on protein-enhanced fluorescence anisotropy

Abstract

Here we report a molecular mass amplifying strategy to construct a fluorescence anisotropy sensor for the detection of microRNA. Because fluorescence anisotropy is less affected by biological matrix interferences, the proposed method can be used directly for the detection of targets in tumor cell lysates without any tedious sample pretreatment, and a good linearity in the 10 pM to 0.5 nM range with a detection limit down to 3.4 pM was achieved. The results established that our method can be used to design fluorescence anisotropy sensors for rapid, sensitive, and selective detection of miRNAs for early diagnosis of cancer.