Electric Field Assisted Surface Plasmon-Coupled Directional Emission: An Active Strategy on Enhancing Sensitivity for DNA Sensing and Efficient Discrimination of Single Base Mutation

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY , 133 , 6, 1787-1789, Publication Date : FEB 16 2011

Author: Shuo-Hui Cao, Tang-Tang Xie, Wei-Peng Cai, Qian Liu, and Yao-Qun Li*

Abstract：We have demonstrated the proof-of-principle of electric field assisted surface plasmon-coupled directional emission (E-SPCDE). The combination of SPCDE and electric field control produced a significant synergistic effect to amplify the right signal and suppress the wrong signal intelligently in an active strategy. A novel hairpin structured DNA biosensor based on the quenching and enhancing of fluorescence in SPCDE has been designed. With modulation of the fluorescence coupling efficiency, a high discrimination ratio up to more than 20-fold has been achieved by enhancing the signal of match and suppressing that of mismatch. E-SPCDE has shown a successful application in DNA sensing, eliminating false positives and false negatives in the detection. E-SPCDE should provide an opportunity to create a new generation of miniaturized high-performance sensing platforms especially in chip-based microarrays and to make the manipulation of the nanometer-scale processes more accessible and detectable.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja107964s