Highly effective colorimetric and visual detection of nucleic acids using an asymmetrically split peroxidase DNAzyme.

G-quadruplex containing peroxidase DNAzyme is a complex of hemin and a single-stranded guanine-rich DNA (hemin-binding DNA aptamer), which is used as an attractive catalytic label for biosensing recently. Therein, the hemin-binding DNA aptamer contains four GGG repeats and can fold into a G-quadruplex structure. In this paper, we have developed a new split mode to divide the hemin-binding DNA aptamer into two parts: one possesses three GGG repeats, and another part possesses one GGG repeat, namely, the 3:1 split mode. The combination of G-quadruplex and hemin binding could be used as a sensitive probe for the identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms by giving a color signal, visible to the naked eye at room temperature. The G-quadruplex containing peroxidase DNAzyme utilizes the 3:1 split mode and can be directly used for the identification of SNPs with a detection limit in the nM range when the matching length of the probe is short enough. When the matching length of the probe is relatively long, another method adding competition sequences to the probe could also operate effectively for the identification of SNPs. The results also suggested that we could detect the signal when the mutation sample was only 5% in the total target DNA with a competition strategy.