Spherical nucleic acids with tailored DNA conformation via bromide backfilling for the detection of kanamycin

The improper conformation of oligonucleotides on gold nanoparticle surfaces is caused by unintended base adsorption, which hinders DNA hybridization and lowers colloidal stability. In this work, we treated spherical nucleic acids with Br − , which serves as an efficient backfilling agent, to adjust the DNA conformation by displacing bases from the gold surface. To investigate the effect of DNA conformation on interfacial recognition, a kanamycin fluorescent aptasensor was constructed with bromide backfilled-treated spherical nucleic acids. In the presence of kanamycin, the anchored aptamer binds with the target and the partially complementary reporter strand is dissociated from the surface of the gold nanoparticles, resulting in the fluorescence recovery of labelled fluorophore on the reporter strand. Under optimum conditions, the apparent binding affinity of the aptasensor with bromide backfilling was 2.2-fold that without backfilled one. The proposed aptasensor exhibited a good liner relationship between the concentration of kanamycin and fluorescence intensity change in the range 200 nM to 10 μM and the limit of detection was calculated to be 71.53 nM. Moreover, this aptasensor was also successfully applied in a spiked milk sample assay and the satisfactory recoveries were obtained in the range 96.94–101.57%, which demonstrated its potential in practical applications.