Recent advances in micro/nanomaterial-based aptamer selection strategies

Abstract

Aptamers are artificial nucleic acid ligands that have been employed in various funda-mental studies and applications, such as biological analyses, disease diagnostics, targeted therapeu-tics, and environmental pollutant detection. This review focuses on the recent advances in aptamer discovery strategies that have been used to detect various chemicals and biomolecules. Recent ex-amples of the strategies discussed here are based on the classification of these micro/nanomaterial-mediated systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) platforms into three categories: bead-mediated, carbon-based nanomaterial-mediated, and other nanoparticle-mediated strategies. In addition to describing the advantages and limitations of the aforementioned strategies, this review discusses potential strategies to develop high-performance aptamers. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.