Highly sensitive colorimetric detection of 17β-estradiol using split DNA aptamers immobilized on unmodified gold nanoparticles

Gold nanoparticle (AuNP) based colorimetric aptasensor have been developed for many analytes recently largely because of the ease of detection, high sensitivity and potential for high-throughput analysis. Most of the target aptamers for detection have short sequences. However, the approach shows poor performance in terms of detection sensitivity for most of the long-sequence aptamers. To address this problem, for the first time, we split the 76 mer aptamer of 17β-estradiol into two short pieces to improve the AuNP based colorimetric sensitivity. Our results showed that the split P1 + P2 still retained the original 76 mer aptamer's affinity and specificity but increased the detection limit by 10-fold, demonstrating that as low as 0.1 ng/mL 17β-estradiol could be detected. The increased sensitivity may be caused by lower aptamer adsorption concentration and a lower affinity to the AuNPs of a short single-strand DNA (ssDNA) sequence. Our study provided a new way to use long-sequence aptamers to develop a highly sensitive AuNP-based colorimetric aptasensor.