Quantum dot-nucleic acid/aptamer bioconjugate based fluorimetric biosensors

Over the past 10 years, fluorescent semiconductor quantum dot (QD)-biomolecule conjugates have emerged as a powerful new sensing platform showing great potential in a wide range of applications in biosensing, environmental monitoring, and disease diagnosis. This mini-review presents a brief account of the recent development on QD-nucleic acid (NA), particularly NA aptamer, conjugates based biosensors using the Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) readout mechanism. It starts with a brief introduction to the NA aptamer and QD FRET, followed by example approaches to compact QD-DNA conjugates, target readout strategies and sensing performance, and concluded with challenges and outlook for the QD-NA/aptamer bioconjugate sensors.