Target-triggered enzyme-free amplification for highly efficient AND-gated bioimaging in living cells

Rapid, simultaneous, and sensitive detection of biomolecules has important application prospects in disease diagnosis and biomedical research. However, because the content of intracellular endogenous target biomolecules is usually very low, traditional detection methods can't be used for effective detection and imaging, and to enhance the detection sensitivity, signal amplification strategies are frequently required. The hybridization chain reaction (HCR) has been used to detect many disease biomarkers because of its simple operation, good reproducibility, and no enzyme involvement. Although HCR signal amplification methods have been employed to detect and image intracellular biomolecules, there are still false positive signals. Therefore, a target-triggered enzyme-free amplification system (GHCR system) was developed, as a fluorescent AND-gated sensing platform for intracellular target probing. The false positive signals can be well avoided and the accuracy of detection and imaging can be improved by using the design of the AND gate. Two cancer markers, GSH and miR-1246, were used as two orthogonal inputs for the AND gated probe. The AND-gated probe only works when GSH and miR-1246 are the inputs at the same time, and FRET signals can be the output. In addition to the use of AND-gated imaging, FRET-based high-precision ratiometric fluorescence imaging was employed. FRET-based ratiometric fluorescent probes have a higher ability to resist interference from the intracellular environment, they can avoid false positive signals well, and they are expected to have good specificity. Due to the advantages of HCR, AND-gated, and FRET fluorescent probes, the GHCR system exhibited highly efficient AND-gated FRET bioimaging for intracellular endogenous miRNAs with a lower detection limit of 18 pM, which benefits the applications of ratiometric intracellular biosensing and bioimaging and offers a novel concept for advancing the diagnosis and therapeutic strategies in the field of cancer.