Zero-Background Helicase-Dependent Amplification and Its Application to Reliable Assay of Telomerase Activity in Cancer Cell by Eliminating Primer–Dimer Artifacts

Primer–dimer artifacts resulting from unintended template-independent primer–primer interactions often hinder the specific amplification of nucleic acids. We demonstrate, for the first time, zero-background helicase-dependent amplification (HDA), with low concentrations of both ATP and dNTPs. This strategy achieved the reliable evaluation of telomerase activity in cancer cells by eliminating primer–dimer artifacts, which have plagued many previous methods with reduced specificity. We found that the performance of the telomerase assay by zero-background HDA was negatively affected by highly concentrated cellular proteins. This inhibitory effect is attributed to the binding of DNA templates to proteins, thus making them unavailable for polymerases. However, gold nanoparticles were demonstrated to highly attenuate such inhibition by abundant proteins, and to enhance the assay sensitivity and reliability when the reaction was performed with concentrated cell extracts.