A recyclable electrochemical sensing platform for breast cancer diagnosis based on homogeneous DNA hybridization and host-guest interaction between cucurbit [7]uril and ferrocene-nanosphere with signal amplification

•A recyclable electrochemical sensing platform was developed for BRCA DNA analysis.•The platform was built by host-guest interaction and homogeneous DNA hybridization.•This strategy showed excellent sensitivity by dual signal amplification for BRCA DNA.•The recyclable property of sensing platform was achieved by simple pH control.•This strategy was successfully applied to detect BRCA DNA in human serum samples.

Recently, many strategies have been developed to trace the breast cancer susceptibility gene (BRCA), which is closely related to the occurrence of breast cancer. In this work, a novel recyclable electrochemical sensing platform was constructed to detect BRCA DNA based on the homogeneous hybridization of this target sequence with ferrocene-labeled DNA/Au nanospheres (FcNS) and horseradish peroxidase-labeled DNA/Au nanospheres (HRPNS) concatamers, and the host-guest interaction between cucurbit [7]uril (CB [7]) adsorbed on the electrode and Fc on the hybridization complex. With the optimization of experimental conditions, the fabricated sensing platform showed improved sensitivity with a low detection limit of 25 pM (S/N = 3), contributed by the dual amplification of signal using FcNS and HRPNS concatamers, and high specificity for BRCA DNA. The captured complex was dissociated from CB [7]-modified electrode with the rise of pH value to recycle the sensing platform. Furthermore, this detection strategy displayed the reliability and applicability in the analysis of human serum samples, indicating great potential for applications in early diagnosis of breast cancer.