| Year | 2020 |
|---|---|
| Journal Info. | Analytical Chemistry, 92, 2628-2634 (2020) |
| Author | Yixuan Wu, Namhyun Choi, Hao Chen, Hajun Dang, Lingxin Chen* and Jaebum Choo* |
| etc. |
We report a surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay platform for the sensitive and rapid detection of a DNA marker (pagA) of Bacillus anthracis. Real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) has been recently considered a gold standard for the quantitative evaluation of a target gene, but it still suffers from the problem of a long thermocycling time. To address this issue, we developed a conceptually new SERS−PCR platform and evaluated its performance by sequentially measuring the Raman signals of B. anthracis DNA after the completion of different thermocycling numbers. According to our experimental data, SERS−PCR has lower limits of detection (LODs) than RT-qPCR under the small cycle number of 20. Particularly, it was impossible to detect a target DNA amplicon using RT-qPCR before the number of cycles reached 15, but SERS−PCR enabled DNA detection after only five cycles with an LOD value of 960 pM. In addition, the dynamic range for SERS−PCR (0.1−1000 pM) is wider than that for RTqPCR (150−1000 pM) under the same condition. We believe that this SERS−PCR technique has a strong potential to be a powerful tool for the rapid and sensitive diagnosis of infectious diseases in the near future.
