Selective and sensitive detection of miRNA-198 using single polymeric microfiber waveguide platform with heterogeneous CHA amplification strategy.

Pancreatic cancer (PC), which has a high fatality rate, is a kind of cancer with poor diagnosis and poor prognosis. Development of selective and sensitive detection platform to diagnose and prognostic of PC has attracted considerable attention. The miRNA-198 has been reported a potential prognostic and early diagnostic marker signature of PC. Herein, we report a novel sensitive detection of miRNA-198 in buffer and serum based on one dimensional chitosan/fluorescein isothiocyanate (CS/FITC) fluorescent microfiber waveguide system combined with the catalytic hairpin assembly amplification strategy. By combination with condensing enrichment effect, the proposed detection platform exhibited high specificity and sensitivity to miRNA-198 target, giving a detection limit as low as 2 fM. More importantly, the proposed detection platform can be applied directly to distinguish the expression of miRNA-198 in clinical serum, affording the ability to distinguish pancreatic cancer patients from those of healthy human beings, and quantify the expression variation of miRNA-198 for the pancreatic cancer patients before and after resection, which may pave the way to develop novel clinical diagnostic equipment for cancer diagnosis and therapeutic evaluation.