Biomimetic
construction of artificial scaffolds has attracted increasing
attention. However, the construction methods usually require redundant
materials and procedures, which is inconvenient for further application.
Herein, inspired by the polyvalent multifunctional structure in nature,
we have designed a polyvalent biotinylated aptamer scaffold (PBAS)
which can conduct analytical performance with high sensitivity and
simplified procedures. To construct a PBAS, the aptamers are designed
to hybridize with prepared linker probes to form polyvalent biotinylated
scaffolds, which contain both multiple aptamers and signal labels.
Therefore, multifunctional scaffolds can be constructed with high
recognition and capture efficiency as well as significant signal amplification.
Furthermore, the scaffold can be used for the assay of some disease
marker proteins. By taking tau proteins as an example, the proposed
aptasensor can exhibit excellent performance with a low detection
limit of 153 pg mL–1 and a short assay time of 50
min, which is much better than most of the previous methods. By assays
of tau proteins in both serum and artificial cerebro spinal fluid,
the PBAS-based aptasensor can work well. Therefore, the scaffold may
be expected to be a powerful analytical tool which may have wide applications
in the detection of a variety of analytes.