Detection of Biomarkers in Blood Using Liquid Crystals Assisted with Aptamer-Target Recognition Triggered in Situ Rolling Circle Amplification on Magnetic Beads

Detection of biomarkers in body fluids is critical to both diagnosing the life-threatening diseases and optimizing therapeutic interventions. We herein report use of liquid crystals (LCs) to detect biomarkers in blood with high sensitivity and specificity by employing in situ rolling circle amplification (RCA) on magnetic beads (MBs). Specific recognition of cancer biomarkers, such as platelet derived growth factor BB (PDGF-BB) and adenosine, by aptamers leads to formation of a nucleic acid circle on MBs preassembled with ligation DNA, linear padlock DNA, and aptamers, thereby triggering in situ RCA. LCs change from dark to bright appearance after the in situ RCA products being transferred onto the LC interface decorated with octadecy trimethylammonium bromide (OTAB), which is particularly sensitive to the amplified DNA on MBs. Overall, this label-free approach takes advantages of high specificity of aptamer-based assay, efficient enrichment of signaling molecules on MBs, remarkable DNA elongation performance of the RCA reaction, and high sensitivity of LC-based assay. It successfully eliminates the matrix interference on the LC-based sensors and thus achieves at least 4 orders of magnitude improvement in sensitivity for detection of biomarkers compared to other LC-based sensors. In addition, performance of the developed sensor is comparable to that of the commercial ones. Thus, this study provides a simple, powerful, and promising approach to facilitate highly sensitive, specific, and label-free detection of biomarkers in body fluids.