Cleavable Molecular Beacon for Hg<sup>2+</sup> Detection Based on Phosphorothioate RNA Modifications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mercury is a highly toxic heavy metal, and detection of Hg(2+) by biosensors has attracted extensive research interest in the past decade. In particular, a number of DNA-based sensing strategies have been developed. Well-known examples include thymine-Hg(2+) interactions and Hg(2+)-activated DNAzymes. However, these mechanisms are highly dependent on buffer conditions or require hybridization with another DNA strand. Herein, we report a new mechanism based on Hg(2+)-induced cleavage of phosphorothioate (PS) modified RNA. Among the various metal ions tested, Hg(2+) induced the most significant cleavage (∼16%), while other metals cleaved less than 2% of the same substrate. The uncleaved substrate undergoes desulfurization in the presence of Hg(2+). This cleavage reaction yields a similar amount of product from pH 3.5 to 7 and in the temperature range between 20 and 90 °C. Various PS RNA junctions can be cleaved with a similar efficiency, but PS DNA junctions cannot be cleaved. A molecular beacon containing three PS RNA modifications is designed, detecting Hg(2+) down to 1.7 nM with excellent selectivity. This sensor can also detect Hg(2+) in the Lake Ontario water sample, although its response is significantly masked by fish tissues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".