Synthetic multivalent DNAzymes for enhanced hydrogen peroxide catalysis and sensitive colorimetric glucose detection

• First multivalent DNAzyme based on a synthetic multimeric G4-DNA.
• Enhanced G-quadruplex formation through G4-DNA multimerization.
• Rapidest H2O2 catalysis and stabilized ABTS reporter bya trivalent DNAzyme.
• Best multivalent DNAzyme by most stable multimeric G4-DNA:hemin complex.
• Sensitive multivalent DNAzyme-based glucose assay without the need of ATP.

A peroxidase-mimic DNAzyme is a G-quadruplex (G4) DNA–hemin complex, in which the G4-DNA resembles an apoenzyme, and hemin is the cofactor for hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) catalysis. Twenty-one-mer CatG4 is a well-proven G4-DNA as well as a hemin-binding aptamer for constituting a DNAzyme. This work studied if a multivalent DNAzyme with accelerated catalysis could be constructed using a multimeric CatG4 with hemin. We compared CatG4 monomer, dimer, trimer, and tetramer, which were prepared by custom oligo synthesis, for G4 structure formation. According to circular dichroism (CD) analysis, we found that a CatG4 multimer exhibited more active G4 conformation than the sum effect of equal-number CatG4 monomers. However, the DNAzyme kinetics was not improved monotonically along with the subunit number of a multimeric CatG4. It was the trivalent DNAzyme, trimeric CatG4:hemin, resulting in the rapidest H2O2 catalysis instead of a tetravalent one. We discovered that the trivalent DNAzyme’s highest catalytic rate was correlated to its most stable hemin-binding G4 structure, evidenced by CD melting temperature analysis. Finally, a trivalent DNAzyme-based colorimetric glucose assay with a detection limit as low as 10 μM was demonstrated, and this assay did not need adenosine 5′-tri-phosphate disodium salt hydrate (ATP) as a DNAzyme boosting agent.

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