A biosensing of Toxoplasma gondii DNA with CdTe/Fe3O4 dual functional quantum dot as reporter group

Toxoplasma gondii is an intestinal coccidium that parasitizes members of the cat family as definitive hosts and has a wide range of intermediate hosts. Infection is common in many warm-blooded animals, including humans, the early detection of Toxoplasma gondii was concerned in recent years. In the current research, we presented a fast, specific, and sensitive sensing probe to detect Toxoplasma gondii DNA based on mechanism of fluorescence energy transfer (FRET), and a magnetic-fluorescent CdTe/Fe3O4 core-shell quantum dots (mQDs) was utilized as energy donor, and a commercial quencher (BHQ-2) was used as energy acceptor, respectively. The CdTe/Fe3O4 mQDs were prepared by layer-by-layer (LBL) process at ambient temperature. The sensing probe was fabricated through labeling a stem-loop Toxoplasma gondii DNA oligonucleotide with mQDs at the 5' end and BHQ-2 at 3' end, respectively, and the resulting sensing probe can be simply isolated and purified from the reactant with a common magnet. Properties of mQDs and sensing probe were determined by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and fluorescence spectrum (FS). The TEM data demonstrated that the size of mQDs was ~20nm. the FS data indicated fluorescence intensity (FI) was doubled after the complete complimentary target Toxoplasma gondii DNA was introduced comparing with the FI before addition of target Toxoplasma gondii DNA. Moreover, only weak FI change was observed when the target DNA with one-mismatch base pair was added, this result revealed the sensing probe has high sensitivity and specificity. The current sensing probe will has great potential applications in the life science and related research.