title: Recent advances in fluorescent nucleic acid probes for living cell studies.
abstract: Living cell studies can offer tremendous opportunities for biological and disease studies. Due to their high sensitivity and selectivity, minimum interference with living biological systems, ease of design and synthesis, fluorescent nucleic acid probes (FNAPs) have been widely used in living cell studies, such as for intracellular detection, cell detection, and cell-to-cell communication. Here, we review the general requirements and the recent developments in FNAPs for living cell studies. We broadly classify these designs as hybridization probes and aptamer probes. For hybridization probes, we describe recently developed designs, such as nanomaterial-based and amplification-based hybridization probes. For aptamer probes, we discuss four general paradigms that have appeared most frequently in the literature: nanomaterial-based, nanomachine-based, cell surface-anchored and activatable aptamer probe designs in vivo. FNAPs promise to open up new and exciting opportunities in biological marks detection for a wide range of biological and medical applications.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Institute of Biology, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China. kmwang@hnu.edu.cn
authors.forename: Kemin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Xiaohai
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Xiaoxiao
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Jianbo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D052157:Aptamers, Nucleotide / Q000378:metabolism; D002470:Cell Survival; D002477:Cells / Q000166:cytology* / Q000378:metabolism*; D015342:DNA Probes / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism; D005456:Fluorescent Dyes / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism; D006801:Humans; D009693:Nucleic Acid Hybridization; D015347:RNA Probes / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D052157:Aptamers, Nucleotide; D015342:DNA Probes; D005456:Fluorescent Dyes; D015347:RNA Probes