Integrating dye-intercalated DNA dendrimers with electrospun nanofibers: a new fluorescent sensing platform for nucleic acids, proteins, and cells.

We integrated for the first time a novel dye-intercalated DNA dendrimer probe (GSG) with the electrospun nanofibers (NFs) to create an amplified fluorescent sensing platform for the detection of nucleic acids, proteins, and cancer cells. The sensing platform is constructed based on the formation of the NF-capture/target/reporter-GSG sandwich-type nanocomplex on the NF membrane surface, leading to large fluorescence signal amplification. Taking advantage of the dual-amplification of both the strong emission intensity of GSG and the large surface area-to-volume ratio of NFs, this platform enables highly sensitive detection of 20 pM of a β-thalassemia gene fragment.

Structural and functional characterization of tumor suppressors TIG3 and H-REV107.

H-REV107-like family proteins TIG3 and H-REV107 are class II tumor suppressors. Here we report that the C-terminal domains (CTDs) of TIG3 and H-REV107 can induce HeLa cell death independently. The N-terminal domain (NTD) of TIG3 enhances the cell death inducing ability of CTD, while NTD of H-REV107 plays an inhibitory role.

Automatic enumeration of gold nanomaterials at the single-particle level.

In this study, we developed a highly sensitive automatic counting method for gold nanomaterials at the single particle level, which can serve as a general sensing platform based on counting of gold nanomaterials. This method substantially improved the sensitivity and accuracy for AuNP counting by adopting the color image processing based on the distinctive localized plasmonic light-scattering of gold nanomaterials. The 60-nm AuNPs, with concentrations down to 4 fM, can be detected with our method.

Modulating fluorescence anisotropy of terminally labeled double-stranded DNA via the interaction between dye and nucleotides for rational design of DNA recognition based applications.

Effective signal enhancement for fluorescence anisotropy in a simple manner is most desirable for fluorescence anisotropy method development. This work aimed to provide insights into the fluorescence anisotropy of terminally labeled double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) to facilitate a facile and universal design strategy for DNA recognition based applications. We demonstrated that fluorescence anisotropy of dsDNA could be regulated by the nature of dyes, the molecular volume, and the end structure of dsDNA.

Counting bacteria using functionalized gold nanoparticles as the light-scattering reporter.

A simple and rapid bacterial counting method was developed based on dark-field light-scattering imaging of bacteria and gold nanoparticle (AuNP) reporter simultaneously. Commercially available DH5α E. coli strain was used as the model bacterium to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.