A New Strategy Involving the Use of Peptides and Graphene Oxide for Fluorescence Turn-on Detection of Proteins

The detection of proteins is of great biological significance as disease biomarkers in early diagnosis, prognosis tracking and therapeutic evaluation. Thus, we developed a simple, sensitive and universal protein-sensing platform based on peptide and graphene oxide (GO). The design consists of a fluorophore (TAMRA, TAM), a peptide containing eight arginines and peptide ligand that could recognize the target protein, and GO used as a quencher. To demonstrate the feasible use of the sensor for target detection, Bcl-xL was evaluated as the model target. The sensor was proved to be sensitive and applied for the detection of the target proteins in buffer, 2% serum and living cells.