AIEgens/Nucleic Acid Nanostructures for Bioanalytical Applications

DNA occupies significant roles in life processes, which include encoding the sequences of proteins and accurately transferring genetic information from generation to generation. Recent discoveries have demonstrated that a variety of biological functions are correlated with DNA's conformational transitions. The non-B form has attained great attention among the diverse forms of DNA over the past several years. The main reason for this is that a large number of studies have shown that the non-B form of DNA is associated with gross deletions, inversions, duplications, translocations as well as simple repeating sequences, which therefore causes human diseases. Consequently, the conformational transition of DNA between the B-form and the non-B form is important for biology. Conventional fluorescence probes based on the conformational transitions of DNA usually need a fluorophore and a quencher group, which suffers from the complex design of the structure and tedious synthetic procedures. Moreover, conventional fluorescence probes are subject to the aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) effect, which limits their application toward imaging and analyte detection. Fluorogens exhibiting aggregation-induced emission (AIE) have attracted tremendous attention over the past decade. By taking advantage of this unique behavior, plenty of fluorescent switch-on probes without the incorporation of fluorescent quenchers/fluorophore pairs have been widely developed as biosensors for imaging a variety of analytes. Herein, the recent progress in bioanalytical applications on the basis of aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIEgens)/nucleic acid nanostructures are presented and discussed.