Biochemical and nanotechnological strategies for signal enhancement in the detection of nucleic acids with biosensors

It was one of the proposals of the DINAMICS European collaborative research project to develop signal enhancement strategies that could take place after target analyte recognition by the biosensor probes, thus in an independent stage from a target nucleic-acid amplification step (such as PCR). In this report, we will review a number of presented methods that try (or could be amenable) to attain post-recognition signal enhancement of the nucleic-acid specific binding inherent in sensing. This commonly means that a biosensor exposes specific oligonucleotide probes to the analyte flow, capturing the specifically searched for nucleic acids; later some processing would turn such recognition into a more easily detectable structure, to enhance an otherwise weak signal due to the presence of few bound molecules.