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N 6 -Methyladenine (6mdA) and N 4 -methylcytosine (4mdC) are the two most dominant DNA modifications in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but standard hybridization-based techniques cannot be applied for the 6mdA/4mdC assay. Herein, we demonstrate the silver-coordinated Watson-Crick pairing-driven three-dimensional (3D) DNA walker for locus-specific detection of genomic 6mdA/4mdC at the single-molecule level. 6mdA-DNA and 4mdC-DNA can selectively hybridize with the binding probes (BP1 and BP2) to form 6mdA-DNA-BP1 and 4mdC-DNA-BP2 duplexes. The 6mdA-C/4mdC-A mismatches cannot be stabilized by Ag I , and thus, 18-nt BP1/BP2 cannot be extended by the catalysis of KF exonuclease. Through toehold-mediated strand displacement (TMSD), the signal probe (SP1/SP2) functionalized on the gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) can competitively bind to BP1/BP2 in 6mdA-DNA-BP1/4mdC-DNA-BP2 duplex to obtain SP1-18-nt BP1 and SP2-18-nt BP2 duplexes. The resulting DNA duplexes can act as the substrates of lambda exonuclease, leading to the cleavage of SP1/SP2 and the release of Cy3/Cy5 and 18-nt BP1/BP2. The released 18-nt BP1/BP2 can subsequently serve as the walker DNA, moving along the surface of the AuNP to activate dynamic 3D DNA walking and releasing abundant Cy3/Cy5. The released Cy3/Cy5 can be quantified by single-molecule imaging. This nanosensor exhibits high sensitivity with a limit of detection (LOD) of 9.80 × 10 -15 M for 6mdA-DNA and 9.97 × 10 -15 M for 4mdC-DNA. It can discriminate 6mdA-/4mdC-DNA from unmodified genomic DNAs, distinguish 0.01% 6mdA-/4mdC-DNA from excess unmethylated DNAs, and quantify 6mdA-/4mdC-DNA at specific sites in genomic DNAs of liver cancer cells and Escherichia coli plasmid cloning vector, providing a new platform for locus-specific analysis of 6mdA/4mdC in genomic DNAs.

DNA glycosylase is an initiating enzyme of cellular base excision repair pathway which is responsible for the repair of various DNA lesions and the maintenance of genomic stability, and the dysregulation of DNA glycosylase activity is associated with a variety of human pathology. Accurate detection of DNA glycosylase activity is critical to both clinical diagnosis and therapeutics, but conventional methods for the DNA glycosylase assay are usually time-consuming with poor sensitivity. Here, we demonstrate the base-excision-repair-induced construction of a single quantum dot (QD)-based sensor for highly sensitive measurement of DNA glycosylase activity. We use human 8-oxoguanine-DNA glycosylase 1 (hOGG1), which is responsible for specifically repairing the damaged 8-hydroxyguanine (8-oxoG, one of the most abundant and widely studied DNA damage products), as a model DNA glycosylase. In the presence of biotin-labeled DNA substrate, the hOGG1 may catalyze the removal of 8-oxo G from 8-oxoG·C base pairs to generate an apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) site. With the assistance of apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease (APE1), the cleavage of the AP site results in the generation of a single-nucleotide gap. Subsequently, DNA polymerase β incorporates a Cy5-labeled dGTP into the DNA substrate to fill the gap. With the addition of streptavidin-coated QDs, a QD-DNA-Cy5 nanostructure is formed via specific biotin-streptavidin binding, inducing the occurrence of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) from the QD to Cy5. The resulting Cy5 signal can be simply monitored by total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) imaging. The proposed method enables highly sensitive measurement of hOGG1 activity with a detection limit of 1.8 × 10(-6) U/μL. Moreover, it can be used to measure the enzyme kinetic parameters and detect the hOGG1 activity in crude cell extracts, offering a powerful tool for biomedical research and clinical diagnosis.