LAUSR

Abstract According to the principle of metal-enhanced fluorescence (MEF), a localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) based method was used to develop a highly sensitive fluorescent aptasensor for detecting adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In this work, a polyAn-based special nucleic acid aptamers modified on gold nanoparticle (AuNPs) were hybridized with the FAM-labeled single-stand oligonucleotides. It was found that a great enhancement of fluorescence intensity in the nanostructures could be programmable regulated by adjusting the number of base A. The experiments showed the maximum enhancement for the fluorophore occurs when the polyAn length reached to 9 nm and, there was a good linear relationship between the fluorescence intensity and concentrations of ATP in the range of 0.5–1 nM. The detection limit obtained was 0.2 nM. Compared with the detection performances of traditional strategies, the sensitivity of the method was increased by more than 7 times, which make it hold great potential in bioanalytical and biological studies.