DNA-templated coinage metal nanostructures and their applications in bioanalysis and biomedicine

The well-known coordination interactions between coinage metal cations and DNA bases provide the possibility of fabricating a broad range of DNA-templated coinage metal nanostructures (CMNs). These CMNs possess useful optical, electronic, magnetic, and catalytic characteristics and have been widely applied in many fields. This review first summarizes the synthesis of CMNs of various types using different DNA templates and then discusses the application of these nanostructures in bioanalysis and biomedicine, including ion detection, nucleic acid detection, enzyme detection, biomolecule detection, and bioimaging in recent years. The basic operational principles, the main performance characteristics, as well as the advantages compared to other methods of these DNA-templated CMNs based applications are reviewed. Finally, the problems that remain to be solved and the prospects for future development in this area are proposed. It is hoped that this review will convey how developments in DNA-templated CMNs have led to numerous applications of them in the bioanalysis and biomedicine fields, and inspire more novel and practical DNA-templated CMNs based applications.