Issue 24, 2020

A photo zipper locked DNA nanomachine with an internal standard for precise miRNA imaging in living cells

Abstract

DNA nanomachines are capable of converting tiny triggers into autonomous accelerated cascade hybridization reactions and they have been used as a signal amplification strategy for intracellular imaging. However, the “always active” property of most DNA nanomachines with an “absolute intensity-dependent” signal acquisition mode results in “false positive signal amplification” by extracellular analytes and impairs detection accuracy. Here we design a photo zipper locked miRNA responsive DNA nanomachine (PZ-DNA nanomachine) based on upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) with a photo-cleavable DNA strand to block the miRNA recognition region, which provided sufficient protection to the DNA nanomachine against nonspecific extracellular activation and allowed satisfactory signal amplification for sensitive miRNA imaging after intracellular photoactivation. Multiple emissions from the UCNPs were also utilized as an internal standard to self-calibrate the intracellular miRNA responsive fluorescence signal. The presented PZ-DNA nanomachine demonstrated the sensitive imaging of intracellular miRNA from different cell lines, which resulted in good accordance with qRT-PCR measurements, providing a universal platform for precise imaging in living cells with high spatial–temporal specificity.

Graphical abstract: A photo zipper locked DNA nanomachine with an internal standard for precise miRNA imaging in living cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
21 jan 2020
Accepted
26 mai 2020
First published
26 mai 2020
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2020,11, 6289-6296

A photo zipper locked DNA nanomachine with an internal standard for precise miRNA imaging in living cells

Y. Zhang, Y. Zhang, X. Zhang, Y. Li, Y. He, Y. Liu and H. Ju, Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 6289 DOI: 10.1039/D0SC00394H

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