Molecular Crowding Evolution for Enabling Discovery of Enthalpy-Driven Aptamers for Robust Biomedical Applications

An enthalpy-driven ligand is an ideal probe for practical applications because of the formation of abundant specific bonds between the ligand and target, compared to an entropy driven ligand with a similar Gibbs free energy change. However, there has been a lack of direct discovery strategy for identifying enthalpy-driven ligands. In this work, a molecular crowding SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) strategy for discovering enthalpy-driven aptamers was developed to improve the affinity and selectivity of aptamers in complex samples. Three aptamer sequences were successfully evolved against a tumor biomarker Protein, and all proved to be enthalpy-driven by thermodynamics analysis, establishing the feasibility of molecular crowding SELEX for effective discovery of enthalpy-driven aptamers. Further comparison of aptamers evolved from conventional SELEX in buffer and molecular crowding SELEX (SYL-H2C) revealed much higher affinity of SYL-H2C. With its improved thermodynamic properties, the enthalpy-driven SYL-H2C aptamer was able to detect circulating tumor cells in real cancer patient blood samples with excellent detection accuracy (10/10). The proposed molecular crowding screening strategy offers a promising direction for discovering robust binding probes for a great variety of biomedical applications.