Hydroxylamine-amplified gold nanoparticles for the naked eye and chemiluminescent detection of sequence-specific DNA with notable potential for single-nucleotide polymorphism discrimination.

Herein, we report a hydroxylamine-amplified gold nanoparticle-based assay with naked eye and chemiluminescent (CL) detection of sequence-specific DNA. For the naked eye detection assay, the signal can be observed by naked eye directly, which provides a general way for other biological assays. In contrast, the CL detection method can improve the detection limit by two orders of magnitude as compared to the naked eye detection, and a limit as low as 10 amol of target DNA can be sensitively detected. Most importantly, stringent control of either temperature or salt concentration is not needed during washing steps, and this new methodology exhibits an excellent capability for differentiating a perfectly matched target oligonucleotide from eight kinds of one-nucleotide mismatched oligonucleotides, and this detection specificity indicates that the present protocol could be applied to single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis in many fields.