A versatile biosensing system for DNA-related enzyme activity assay via the synthesis of silver nanoclusters using enzymatically-generated DNA as template

In the present day, oligonucleotide-encapsulated silver clusters (DNA-AgNCs) have been widely applied into bio-analysis as a signal producer. Herein, we developed a novel method to synthesize DNA-AgNCs encapsulated by long-chain cytosine (C)-rich DNA. Such DNA was polymerized in a template-free way by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT). We demonstrated that TdT-polymerized long chain C-rich DNA can serve as an excellent template for AgNCs synthesis. Based on this novel synthesis strategy, we developed a label-free and turn-on fluorescence assay to detect TdT activity with ultralow limit of detection (LOD) of 0.0318 U and ultrahigh signal to background (S/B) of 46.7. Furthermore, our proposed method was extended to a versatile biosensing strategy for turn-on nucleases activity assay based on the enzyme-activated TdT polymerization. Two nucleases, EcoRI and ExoIII as model of endonuclease and exonuclease, respectively, have been detected with high selectivity and competitive low LOD of 0.0629 U and 0.00867 U, respectively. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of TdT polymerization-based DNA-AgNCs synthesis strategy as a versatile and potent biosensing platform to detect the activity of DNA-related enzymes.