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Abstract Nucleic acid detection plays a crucial role in various applications, including disease diagnostics, research development, food safety, and environmental health monitoring. A rapid, point‐of‐care (POC) nucleic acid test can greatly benefit healthcare system by providing timely diagnosis for effective treatment and patient management, as well as supporting diseases surveillance for emerging pandemic diseases. Recent advancements in nucleic acids technology have led to rapid assays for single‐stranded nucleic acids that can be integrated into simple and miniaturized platforms for ease of use. In this review, the study focuses on the developments in isothermal amplification, nucleic acid hybridization circuits, various enzyme‐based signal reporting mechanisms, and detection platforms that show promise for POC testing. The study also evaluates critical technical breakthroughs to identify the advantages and disadvantages of these methods in various applications.
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This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
Kinetics and dynamics of oligonucleotide hybridization
The hybridization of short nucleic acid strands is a remarkable spontaneous process that is foundational to biotechnology and nanotechnology and plays a crucial role in gene expression and editing and DNA repair. Decades of research into the mechanism of hybridization have resulted in a deep understanding of its thermodynamics, but many questions remain regarding its kinetics and dynamics. Recent advances in experiments and molecular dynamics simulations of nucleic acids are enabling more direct insight into the structural dynamics of hybridization which can test long-standing assumptions regarding its mechanism. In this Review, we summarize the current state of knowledge of hybridization kinetics, discuss the barriers to a molecular description of hybridization dynamics, and highlight the new approaches that have begun uncovering the dynamics of hybridization and the duplex ensemble. The kinetics and dynamics of hybridization are highly sensitive to the composition of nucleic acids, and we emphasize recent discoveries and open questions on the role of nucleobase sequence and chemical modifications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2155027
- PAR ID:
- 10591691
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer/Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Reviews Chemistry
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2397-3358
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 305 to 327
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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