Photoactive conjugated microporous polymer/carbon nanotube coupled with T-junction recycling dual-strand displacement amplification for sensing N-Gene of COVID-19

In this work, a novel conjugated microporous polymer on carbon nanotube composite (CMP-CNTs) was syn-thesized as photoelectrochemical (PEC) signal probe to construct sensitive PEC biosensor for sensing N-Gene of COVID-19 by integrating with an ingenious target-trigger T-junction recycling dual-strand displacement amplification (T-DSDA). The CMP-CNTs composites has an ideal photoelectrical conversion efficiency owing to the appearance of a good band matching that can effectively promote electron-hole pairs separation and accelerate carrier migration, thereby generating an extremely high initial photocurrent. Meanwhile, the T-DSDA with superior target conversion efficiency to traditional approaches could convert the small number of targets into extensive output DNAs, leading to the in-situ generation of quench agent N-GQDS decorated nanowires on electrode for significantly reducing initial photocurrent. The results demonstrated that proposed PEC biosensor had a high sensitivity towards N-Gene of COVID-19 and the detection limit was 33 aM, which provided a new way to build the simple, sensitive, and reliable sensing platform for great potential in biological analysis and early clinical diagnosis.

Automated summary

A novel conjugated microporous polymer on carbon nanotube composite (CMP-CNTs) was synthesized as a photoelectrochemical (PEC) signal probe for constructing a sensitive PEC biosensor to detect the N gene of COVID-19. By integrating with target-triggered T-junction recycling dual-strand displacement amplification (T-DSDA), CMP-CNTs composites exhibited ideal photoelectrical conversion efficiency due to effective electron-hole pairs separation and accelerated carrier migration. The proposed PEC biosensor showed high sensitivity towards the N-Gene of COVID-19 with a detection limit of 33 aM, providing a new way for simple, sensitive, and reliable sensing platform in biological analysis and early clinical diagnosis.