Selection and applications of synthetic functional DNAs for bacterial detection

Early detection of an infectious bacterium is essential to preventing a potential outbreak or minimizing the impact of an active infection. Although prevailing methods are effective in many aspects, they suffer from being complex, expensive or insensitive. These drawbacks prevent their applications by the general public or under resource-limited settings. Therefore, developing rapid, accurate, inexpensive and sensitive methods for pathogenic bacterial detection remains a major research focus in the global research community. In recent years, functional nucleic acids, particularly DNA aptamers and DNAzymes, have been increasingly examined as the recognition element for bacterial biomarkers and whole bacterial cells. Significant efforts have also been made to utilize these affinity probes for the design of simple and cost-effective biosensors for bacterial detection. This review highlights the key achievements in this area, identifies important challenges, and provides thoughts on future directions.