Guanine‐Locked DNA Circuit Drives Homogeneous Coupling of Catalytic Hairpin Assembly and dCTP‐Free Rolling Circle Amplification
Both enzyme-free DNA circuits and polymerase-mediated amplification represent powerful and versatile platforms for nucleic acid signal transduction. However, DNA polymerases' intrinsic polymerizing/exonucleolytic activities cause nonspecific extension/degradation of hairpins, restricting the combination of these two reactions to stepwise operations with limited efficiency. Herein, we report a guanine-locked DNA circuit resisting polymerase-mediated side reactions, enabling homogeneous coupling of catalytic hairpin assembly and dCTP-free rolling circle amplification. Modified onto magnetic nanoparticles for optomagnetic biosensing, this platform unifies target recognition, amplification, and real-time transduction in a one-pot isothermal format, achieving a detection limit of 9 aM with a wide dynamic range in 1 h for Botrytis cinerea DNA. The biosensor discriminates Botrytis species and correlates strongly with qPCR (r = -0.986) for infected rose petal samples. This work resolves the incompatibility between hairpin cascades and DNA polymerases, providing a generalizable strategy for crosstalk-free homogeneous nucleic acid circuits.
Authors
- Zhuxin Dong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9059-2430)
- Ruifeng Yao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0367-6423)
- Pingliang Huang
- Bo Tian (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5249-4415)
- Nan Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6619-7545)
- Yilong He
- Yulin Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5498-1078)
- Meng Zhang
- Yuan Fang
Institutions
- Central South University (CN)
- Hunan University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Small
- Published
- 2026-08-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.75508
- Primary Topic
- Advanced biosensing and bioanalysis techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China