MULTIVALENT APTAMER GENERATION THROUGH ROLLING CIRCLE AMPLIFICATION ON A NANOSTRUCTURED SURFACE FOR BIOSENSING APPLICATIONS

Interest toward multivalent aptamers have been increased due their increased binding strength to target molecules, as they can attach to multiple sites at once, creating more stable interactions.This study introduces a method for creating and modifying multivalent aptamers on a surface using room temperature rolling circle amplification (RCA) technique and chemically modified primers.This technique involves attaching the primers to both flat screen-printed gold electrodes and nano-/microisland (NMI) electrodes where multivalent aptamers are then bio-synthesized and organized.These engineered aptamers were used to detect a specific target which is the severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein (SP) in this study.