Electrochemical detection of DNA hybridization usually involves changes in electrochemical parameters such as; capacitance [15], impedance [16] and electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance measurements [17] at fixed potential or detecting complementary target, using both direct electrochemical oxidation of guanine and redox of the electroactive indicator methylene blue [17], [18] and [19]. The above listed electrochemical DNA-sensors that use label-free probes are cost effective alternatives adopted for real-time monitoring, however

with serious drawbacks; low selectivity and low sensitivity [15] and [17]. This paper describes the use of a capacitive DNA-sensor application, where a surface-bound label-free oligonucleotide probes captures a target complementary DNA-sequence and real time measurement is performed. Nevertheless, the application of elevated temperature to reduce non-specific hybridization (interaction

Selleck ICG-001 of non-complementary oligos) in order to increase the selectivity, the influence of oligo length to the signal strength, and application of sandwich hybridization approach in order to amplify the signal strength of the long DNA molecules are reported. All single stranded oligonucleotides were obtained from Eurofins MWG Operon (Ebersberg, Germany): 25-mer oligonucleotides-C (oligo-C); 15-, 25- and 50-mer oligonucleotides-G (oligo-G); and 25-mer oligonucleotides-T (oligo-T). Absolute ethanol and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) were obtained from VWR International (Leuven, Belgium). Tyramine, N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS), N-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) N-ethylcarbodiimide Selleck Pifithrin �� hydrochloride (EDC), ethanesulfonic acid (MES), and 1-dodecane thiol were obtained from Sigma–Aldrich (Steinheim, Germany). All other chemicals used were of analytical grade. All buffers and regeneration solutions were prepared with double distilled water from a Milli-Q system (Millipore, Massachusetts, USA). many All solutions were filtered through

a membrane (pore size 0.22 μm) and degassed prior to use. A gold electrode (99.9% purity, custom-made, ϕ = 3 mm) with a surface area of 0.07 cm2 was used as a working electrode. Prior to the modification with oligonucleotides, the gold electrode was polished with alumina slurry with a particle size of 0.1 μm (Struers, Ballerup, Denmark) and cleaned through sonication in distilled water and subsequently in absolute ethanol, for 15 min in each solvent. It was then washed with distilled water and dried with pure nitrogen gas [20], followed by plasma cleaning, PDC-3XG (Harrick, New York, USA) for 20 min, and after that coated by the electropolymerization of tyramine on the electrode surface [21]. The coated electrode was rinsed with distilled water to remove any loosely bound polymer and it was finally carefully dried with pure nitrogen gas prior to immobilizaton.