Triggering hairpin-free chain-branching growth of fluorescent DNA dendrimers for nonlinear hybridization chain reaction.

We present a nonlinear hybridization chain reaction (HCR) system in which a trigger DNA initiates self-sustained assembly of quenched double-stranded substrates into fluorescent dendritic nanostructures. During the process, an increasing number of originally sequestered trigger sequences labeled with fluorescent reporters are freed up from quenched substrates, leading to chain-branching growth of the assembled DNA dendrimers and an exponential increase in the fluorescence intensity. The triggered assembly behavior was examined by PAGE analysis, and the morphologies of the grown dendrimers were verified by AFM imaging. The exponential kinetics of the fluorescence accumulation was also confirmed by time-dependent fluorescence spectroscopy. This method adopts a simple sequence design strategy, the concept of which could be adapted to program assembly systems with higher-order growth kinetics.