A novel BRCA1 gene deletion detection in human breast carcinoma MCF-7 cells through FRET between quantum dots and silver nanoclusters

BRCA1 (breast cancer 1) genomic deletions are the most important founder mutations in breast cancer patients and can be passed to you from your mother or father. Herein, we report a silver nanoclusters-based (AgNCs-based) fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) method for detection of BRCA1 gene deletion. The method relies on the specific hybridization of DNA-AgNCs fluorescent probe to deleted genes and interaction between double stranded DNA-AgNCs and QD, and the signal amplification through energy transfer from fluorescent AgNCs to QDs during FRET. Such fabricated QDs/DNA-AgNCs interaction might be beneficial for the nanomaterials based biosensing methods Under best possible conditions a linear correlation was established between the fluorescence intensity and the concentration of deletion sequence in the range of 5.0 × 10−13-1.0 × 10−9 M with a detection limit of 1.2 × 10−13 M. Using this method, we could effectively determine gene deletions by using the nonamplified genomic DNAs that were extracted from the MCF-7 as a breast cancer cell line.