Signal-to-noise ratio enhancement of silicon nanowires biosensor with rolling circle amplification

Herein, we describe a novel approach for rapid, label-free and specific DNA detection by applying rolling circle amplification (RCA) based on silicon nanowire field-effect transistor (SiNW-FET) for the first time. Highly responsive SiNWs were fabricated with a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible anisotropic self-stop etching technique which eliminated the need for hybrid method. The probe DNA was immobilized on the surface of SiNW, followed by sandwich hybridization with the perfectly matched target DNA and RCA primer that acted as a primer to hybridize the RCA template. The RCA reaction created a long single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) product and thus enhanced the electronic responses of SiNW significantly. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as a figure-of-merit was analyzed to estimate the signal enhancement and possible detection limit. The nanosensor showed highly sensitive concentration-dependent conductance change in response to specific target DNA sequences. Because of the binding of an abundance of repeated sequences of RCA products, the SNR of >20 for 1 fM DNA detection was achieved, implying a detection floor of 50 aM. This RCA-based SiNW biosensor also discriminated perfectly matched target DNA from one-base mismatched DNA with high selectivity due to the substantially reduced nonspecific binding onto the SiNW surface through RCA. The combination of SiNW FET sensor with RCA will increase diagnostic capacity and the ability of laboratories to detect unexpected viruses, making it a potential tool for early diagnosis of gene-related diseases.