Autocatalytic photochemical reactions triggered by nucleic acids

核酸序列特异性检测是生物科学中的一个重要研究方向，在诊断学和基因组学中正变得越来越重要。虽然酶法检测核酸已经很成熟，但它们有几个局限性。特别是，酶不识别非天然探针，它们对于短探针往往效率低下，不太可能在体内使用。这证明了寻找简单可靠的核酸分析化学方法是合理的。在序列保真度方面，最好的核酸引发的、非酶催化的、均相反应与酶类似物一样具有选择性。然而，灵敏度并不令人满意，因为大多数非酶反应比酶反应慢得多。只要提高了非酶方法的灵敏度，这种反应就可以用于核酸检测。该项目的目的是发现由微量核酸引发的自动催化、金属促进的反应，并导致可检测到的产物数量呈指数级增长。在此基础上，可以开发一种简单的、完全均一的化学分析方法，它将允许直接从生物样品中检测少量核酸，而不需要预扩增。

Sequence specific detection of nucleic acids is a crucial research aspect in biological sciences and is becoming increasingly important in diagnostics and genomics. While enzymatic methods are well established for nucleic acid detection, they have several limitations. In particular, enzymes do not recognise non-natural probes, they are often inefficient with short probes and are unlikely to be used in vivo. This justifies search for simple and reliable chemical methods of nucleic acid analysis. The best nucleic acid triggered, nonenzymatic, homogeneous reactions are as selective as enzymatic analogues in terms of sequence fidelity. However sensitivity is unsatisfactory, since majority of nonenzymatic reactions are considerably slower than enzymatic ones. Providing that the sensitivity of the nonenzymatic methods is improved, such reactions can be used in nucleic acid detection. The aim of this project is to discover autocatalytic, metal-promoted reactions, which are triggered by traces of nucleic acids and lead to exponentially growing amounts of detectable products. On this basis a simple, fully homogeneous chemical assay could be developed, which would allow detection of small amounts of nucleic acids directly from biological samples without pre-amplification.