Enzyme-free and label-free ultrasensitive electrochemical detection of DNA and adenosine triphosphate by dendritic DNA concatamer-based signal amplification

• An enzyme-free and label-free ultrasensitive electrochemical DNA biosensing platform is developed.
• Dendritic DNA concatamer is constructed via HCR strategy for signal amplification.
• It shows a high sensitivity and selectivity toward target DNA and ATP detection.
• It opens a promising direction for enzyme-free and ultrasensitive bioassays.

Hybridization chain reaction (HCR) strategy has been well developed for the fabrication of various biosensing platforms for signal amplification. Herein, a novel enzyme-free and label-free ultrasensitive electrochemical DNA biosensing platform for the detection of target DNA and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) was firstly proposed, in which three auxiliary DNA probes were ingeniously designed to construct the dendritic DNA concatamer via HCR strategy and used as hexaammineruthenium(III) chloride (RuHex) carrier for signal amplification. With the developed dendritic DNA concatamer-based signal amplification strategy, the DNA biosensor could achieve an ultrasensitive electrochemical detection of DNA and ATP with a superior detection limit as low as 5 aM and 20 fM, respectively, and also demonstrate a high selectivity for DNA and ATP detection. The currently proposed dendritic DNA concatamer opens a promising direction to construct ultrasensitive DNA biosensing platform for biomolecular detection in bioanalysis and clinical biomedicine, which offers the distinct advantages of simplicity and cost efficiency owing to no need of any kind of enzyme, chemical modification or labeling.