Fluorescent assay for alkaline phosphatase activity based on graphene oxide integrating with λ exonuclease

A novel fluorescence turn-on strategy for the alkaline phosphatase (ALP) assay is developed based on the preferential binding of graphene oxide (GO) to single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) over double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) coupled with lambda exonuclease (lambda exo) cleavage. Specifically, in the absence of ALP, the substrateds-DNA constructed by one oligonucleotide with a fluorophore at the 3'-end (F-DNA) and its complementary sequence modified with a 5'-phosphoryl termini (p-DNA), is promptly cleaved by lambda exo, and the resulting F-DNA is adsorbed on GO surface, allowing fluorescence quenching. Whereas the introduction of ALP leads to the hydrolysis of the P-DNA, and the yielding 5'-hydroxyl end product hampers the lambda exo cleavage, inducing significant fluorescence enhancement due to the weak binding of dsDNA with GO. Under the optimized conditions, the approach exhibits high sensitivity and specificity to ALP with a detection limit of 0.19 U/L, and the determination of ALP in spiked human serum samples has also been realized. Notably, this new approach not only provides a novel and sensitive platform for the ALP activity detection but also promotes the exploitation of the GO-based biosensing for the detection of the protein with no specific binding element, and thus extending the GO-based sensing applications into a new field. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.