Molecular Recognition-Modulated Hetero-Assembly of Nanostructures for Visualizable and Portable Detection of Circulating miRNAs

Biomolecular markers, particularly circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in diagnosis, monitoring, and therapeutic intervention of cancers. However, existing detection strategies remain intricate, laborious, and far from being developed for point-of-care testing. Here, we report a portable colorimetric sensor that utilizes the hetero-assembly of nanostructures driven by base pairing and recognition for direct detection of miRNAs. Following hybridization, two sizes of nanoparticles modified with single-strand DNA can be robustly assembled into heterostructures with strong optical resonance, exhibiting distinct structure colors. Particularly, the large nanoparticles are first arranged into nanochains to enhance scattering signals of small nanoparticles, which allows for sensitive detection and quantification of miRNAs without the requirement of target extraction, amplification, and fluorescent labels. Furthermore, we demonstrate the high specificity and single-base selectivity of testing different miRNA samples, which shows great potential in the diagnosis, staging, and monitoring of cancers. These heterogeneous assembled nanostructures provide an opportunity to develop simple, fast, and convenient tools for miRNAs detection, which is suitable for many scenarios, especially in low-resource setting.