Toehold-mediated strand displacement reaction formation of three-way junction DNA structure combined with nicking enzyme signal amplification for highly sensitive colorimetric detection of Salmonella Typhimurium.

The detection of Salmonella Typhimurium (S.typhimurium) is of great importance in food safety field. Colorimetric strategy is particularly appealing for S. typhimurium identification because of its user-friendliness and instrument-free. However, the existing colorimetric strategies still meet the challenges of low sensitivity, tedious nucleic acid extraction and expensive labeling processes. Herein, a high sensitivity and label-free colorimetric sensing strategy for S. typhimurium detection without nucleic acid extraction is constructed. Specifically, the proposed strategy is based on three-way junction (3WJ) DNA branched structure combined with nicking enzyme signal amplification (NESA). In the presence of target, cascaded signal amplification is initiated through a series of toehold-mediated strand displacement reactions (TSDRs) to recycle the trigger DNA causing formation of the numerous 3WJ DNA branched structures (3WJ-TSDRs). Then, the branches of 3WJ-TSDRs are fully utilized to hybridize with the DNAzyme signal probes to initiate NESA in the presence of Nt. BbvCI, which making every branch has a function of signal amplification. Finally, DNAzyme signal probes (green) were completely split into two fragments (colorless). The application of NESA in the branches of 3WJ-TSDRs offers a highly sensitive detection of S. typhimurium with a low limit of detection of 42 CFU mL-1. Besides, the colorimetric sensing strategy also shows strong anti-interference. The capability of the colorimetric sensing strategy in spiked samples was also investigated, showing a more intuitive results and fast detection in compare with the traditional plate counting method. With these characteristics, the proposed sensing strategy based on 3WJ-TSDRs and NESA is a promising tool for new point-of-care (POC) applications in food safety.