A label-free and highly sensitive strategy for uracil-DNA glycosylase activity detection based on stem-loop primer-mediated exponential amplification (SPEA)

Uracil-DNA glycosylase (UDG) plays essential roles in base excision repair (BER) pathway by eliminating uracil from DNA to sustain the genome integrity. Sensitive detection of UDG activity is of great significance in the study of many fundamental biochemical processes and clinical applications. We develop a label-free method for UDG activity detection using stem-loop primer-mediated exponential amplification (SPEA). In the presence of active UDG, the uracil base in helper hairpin probe (HP) can be excised to generate an abasic site (AP site), which can be cleaved by endonuclease IV (Endo IV) with a blocked primer released. This primer then triggers the strand displacement reaction to produce a dumb-bell structure DNA, which can initiate a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) reaction. This reaction generates a large number of long double-strand DNA replicates, which can be stained by SYBR Green (SG) I to deliver enhanced fluorescence for quantitative detection of UDG activity. A linear range from 0.001 U/mL to 1 U/mL and a detection limit down to 0.00068 U/mL are achieved. This strategy has also been demonstrated for UDG assay in complex cell lysates, implying its great potential for UDG based clinical diagnostics and therapeutics.