Peptide Nucleic Acids Modified Nano-Biosensor for Early Cancer Diagnosis

摘要

A hand held electronic nanowire-device for DNA-methylation detection is described in this paper. A peptide nucleic acid (PNA) was designed as a universal capture agent for the nano-device. PNA was synthesized, and characterized by MALDI-TOF mass spectroscopy. Purified PNA was covalently linked to the nano-biosensor surface. A novel molecular signal amplification method was applied to generate methylation specific signal molecules. These signal molecules were then captured on PNA modified nano-biosensor, and measured by impedance spectra. Using electronic nano-sensor not only avoids complicated procedures in the conventional methods for DNA methylation detection, but also achieves a high sensitivity without PCR amplification.