Background

Ultrasensitive sequence-specific detection of target nucleic acids has broad ranging applications in clinical diagnostics, water and food safety, environmental monitoring, biosafety and epidemiology. With the introduction of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and other DNA amplification techniques such as recombinase polymerase amplification, template-mediate amplification, helicase-dependent amplification, loop-medicated isothermal amplification and rolling circle amplification, significant progress has been made in the field of molecular diagnostics and nucleic acid biosensors. However, PCR requires precise temperature control and cycling to perform DNA amplification limiting its portability and application in point-of-care diagnostics.