DNA aptamer selected for specific recognition of prostate cancer cells and clinical tissues

Abstract Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in men lack of efficient early diagnosis and therapeutics, calling for effective molecular probes. Herein, we performed cell-based systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (cell-SELEX) to obtain specific recognition of human prostate cancer cells PC–3M. Four aptamers were successfully obtained that can bind to target cells with high affinity and specificity. A 51-nt truncated sequence named Xq-2-C1 was identified after further elaborative analysis on the secondary structure. More importantly, the achieved aptamer Xq-2-C1 not only demonstrated excellent specific to target cells, but also revealed specific recognition to clinical prostate cancer tissue. The tissue imaging results showed that Xq-2-C1 had better recognition ratio for clinical prostate cancer tissue samples (85%) compared to the random sequence (9%). These results demonstrate that these newly generated aptamers would furnish potential applications in the early diagnosis and clinical treatment of prostate cancer.