The search for high-affinity aptamers for targets such as proteins, small molecules, or cancer cells remains a formidable endeavor. Systematic Evolution of Ligands by EXponential Enrichment (SELEX) offers an iterative process to discover these aptamers through evolutionary selection of high-affinity candidates from a highly diverse random pool. This randomness dictates an unknown population dis...

Single-stranded oligonucleotide aptamers have attracted great attention in the past decade because of their diagnostic and therapeutic potential. These versatile, high affinity and specificity reagents are selected by an iterative in vitro process called SELEX, Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment. Numerous SELEX methods have been developed for aptamer selections; some that...

Aptamers and SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) technology have gained increasing attention over the past 25 years. Despite their functional similarity to protein antibodies, oligonucleotide aptamers have many unique properties that are suitable for clinical applications and industrialization. Aptamers may be superior to antibodies in fields such as biomarker disc...

The synthesis of the triphosphates of 4'-thiouridine and 4'-thiocytidine, 4'-thioUTP (7; thioUTP) and 4'-thioCTP (8; thioCTP), and their utility for SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) is described. The new nucleoside triphosphate (NTP) analogs 7 and 8 were prepared from appropriately protected 4'-thiouridine and -cytidine derivatives using the one-pot method repor...

Aflatoxins are naturally occurring mycotoxins that contaminate food and agro commodities, leading to acute and chronic health conditions in human and animals. In the present work, an attempt was made to generate high-affinity single stranded DNA aptamers that specifically bind to Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) by a modified Systemic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) procedure with the...

Aptamers are short nucleic acid or peptide sequences capable of binding to a target molecule with high specificity and affinity. Also known as "artificial antibodies," aptamers provide many advantages over antibodies. One of the major hurdles to aptamer isolation is the initial time and effort needed for selection. The systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) is the tra...

Ovarian cancer (OvCa) is the second most common type of gynecological cancer. More seriously, the prognosis for survival is relatively poor if an early OvCa diagnosis is not achieved. However, it is extremely challenging to diagnose very early stage OvCa, when treatments are the most effective, because of the lack of specific and sensitive biomarkers. Therefore, in order to achieve early detect...

This paper first reports DNA aptamers and a fluorescent enzyme-linked aptamer assay (ELAA) targeting alpha-methylacyl-CoA racemase (AMACR), an emerging prostate cancer biomarker. The aptamers were in vitro selected using a new single-bead SELEX approach, which was rapid and consumed only ca. 45 ng AMACR. Before SELEX, silane chemistry was used to prepare epoxide-functionalized glass microbeads ...