Electrochemical Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction

In this work, we report the first electrochemistry-based real-time polymerase chain reaction technique for sequence-specific nucleic acid detection. This new technique builds upon the advantages of the well-established fluorescence-based counterpart, such as short assay time (simultaneous target DNA amplification and detection). In addition, this electrochemical approach could employ simple and miniaturizable instrumentation compared to the bulky and expensive optics required in the fluorescence-based schemes. We have demonstrated a proof-of-concept experiment showing that the utilization of solid-phase extension of the electrode surface-immobilized capture probe with Fc-dUTP during PCR resulted in the accumulation of the redox marker on the transducer surface. This new technique can be applied to a microfabricated PCR electrochemical device for point-of-care diagnostics as well as on-site environmental monitoring and biowarfare agent detection.