HCR™ Amplifier

HCR™ Amplifiers leverage dynamic nanotechnology to enable small amplification components to first penetrate a biological sample without interacting and then autonomously grow bright amplification polymers at the site of targets within the sample, enabling deep sample penetration and unmatched performance, versatility, and robustness.

 

An HCR™ Amplifier comprises two kinetically trapped reporter-labeled hairpins, h1 and h2, that co-exist metastably on lab time scales. Hairpins h1 and h2 store the energy to drive a conditional self-assembly cascade upon exposure to initiator i1. ​Probes that bind the target use initiator i1 to trigger a chain reaction of alternating h1 and h2 polymerization steps leading to growth of a reporter-decorated amplification polymer tethered to the target.

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HCR™  introduced the concept of conditional nucleic acid self-assembly, demonstrating that nucleic acid molecules can be engineered so as not to interact when mixed, instead self-assembling only upon exposure to a cognate initiator sequence. Conditional nucleic acid self-assembly now provides a conceptual cornerstone for the new field of dynamic nucleic acid nanotechnology.