Accurate high-throughput identification of parallel G-quadruplex topology by a new tetraaryl-substituted imidazole

•A novel colorimetric and fluorescent dual probe for parallel G-quadruplexes was discovered.•A dual-channel and accurate high-throughput method for identifying parallel G-quadruplexes was developed based on the probe.•The probe could be further employed in the high-throughput classification of parallel and anti-parallel G-quadruplexes.

G-quadruplex nucleic acids are four-stranded DNA or RNA secondary structures that are formed in guanine-rich sequences. These structures exhibit extensive structural polymorphism and play a pivotal role in the control of a variety of cellular processes. To date, diverse approaches for high-throughput identification of G-quadruplex structures have been successfully developed, but high-throughput methods for further characterization of their topologies are still lacking. In this study, we report a new tetra-arylimidazole probe psIZCM-1, which was found to display significant and distinctive changes in both the absorption and the fluorescence spectra in the presence of parallel G-quadruplexes but show insignificant changes upon interactions with anti-parallel G-quadruplexes or other non-quadruplex oligonucleotides. In view of this dual-output feature, we used psIZCM-1 to identify the parallel G-quadruplexes from a large set of 314 oligonucleotides (including 300 G‐quadruplex‐forming oligonucleotides and 14 non-quadruplex oligonucleotides) via a microplate reader and accordingly established a high-throughput method for the characterization of parallel G-quadruplex topologies. The accuracy of this method was greater than 95%, which was much higher than that of the commercial probe NMM. To make the approach more practical, we further combined psIZCM-1 with another G-quadruplex probe IZCM-7 to realize the high-throughput classification of parallel, anti-parallel G-quadruplexes and non-quadruplex structures.