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Tumor-associated antigen-specific cell imaging based on upconversion luminescence and nucleic acid rolling circle amplification

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Abstract

Tumor-associated antigen (TAA)–based diagnosis has gained prominence for early tumor screening, treatment monitoring, prognostic assessment, and minimal residual disease detection. However, limitations such as low sensitivity and difficulty in extracting non-specific binding membrane proteins still exist in traditional detection methods. Upconversion luminescence (UCL) exhibits unique physical and chemical properties under wavelength near-infrared light excitation. Rolling circle amplification (RCA) is an efficient DNA amplification technique with amplification factors as high as 105. Therefore, the above two excellent techniques can be employed for highly accurate imaging analysis of tumor cells. Herein, we developed a novel nanoplatform for TAA-specific cell imaging based on UCL and RCA technology. An aptamer–primer complex selectively binds to Mucin 1 (MUC1), one of TAA on cell surface, to trigger RCA reaction, generating a large number of repetitive sequences. These sequences provide lots of binding sites for complementary signal probes, producing UCL from lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) after releasing quencher group. The experimental results demonstrate the specific attachment of upconversion nanomaterials to cancer cells which express a high level of MUC1, indicating the potential of UCNPs and RCA in tumor imaging.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 32000986, 82070518, 82102477, and 82370516).

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Author notes

  1. Ying Zhan and Yichun Mao contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Molecular Recognition and Biosensing, School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, P. R. China

    Ying Zhan, Yichun Mao, Pei Sun, Guifang Chen & Bo Tian

  2. Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Shanghai Tenth People’s Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200072, P. R. China

    Chenbin Liu, Hongquan Gou, Haipeng Qi & Song Hu

  3. School of Medicine, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, 232000, P. R. China

    Haipeng Qi

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  1. Ying Zhan
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Correspondence to Guifang Chen, Song Hu or Bo Tian.

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Zhan, Y., Mao, Y., Sun, P. et al. Tumor-associated antigen-specific cell imaging based on upconversion luminescence and nucleic acid rolling circle amplification. Microchim Acta 191, 248 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-024-06331-2

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