Investigation of 3,3′,5,5′-tetramethylbenzidine as colorimetric substrate for a peroxidatic DNAzyme

In this work, the suitability of 3,3′,5,5′-tetramethylbenzidine sulfate (TMB) as the substrate of a DNAzyme catalytic system composed of a guanine-quadruplex DNA molecule and hemin was investigated. In the presence of H2O2, the hemin–DNA complex catalyzes the oxidation of TMB to produce two colored products, much like a peroxidase. The color-generating activity of this system could be influenced by several factors such as buffer type, pH value, DNA sequence, reaction time, and concentrations of both the hemin and H2O2. To illustrate the utility of this catalytic system, we designed a colorimetric assay, in which a synthetic oligonucleotide with a sequence complementary to the G-quadruplex DNA was used as the target. A detection limit of 1.86 nM was obtained. Our data have shown that TMB was an excellent colorimetric indicator that reported the peoxidase activities of the widely studied hemin–G-quadruplex DNAzyme system.