Nucleic Acids-encoded Amplification for Single-cell Imaging

Single-cell imaging is of great significance in the field of life science and clinical medicine for its application on visualizing and quantifying of targets in single cells. Nucleic acids-encoded amplification converts targets to nucleic acids barcodes through specific molecular reactions,which is easy to achieve signal amplification. Due to its variety of probes,ease of programming,mild reaction conditions and high amplification efficiency,nucleic acids -encoded amplification emerges outstanding performance on sensitive and multiplexed imaging of various targets with low abundance in single cells,emerging as a new strategy for understanding cell state and exploring life process. This paper reviews the research progress of nucleic acids-encoded amplification in the field of single-cell fluorescence imaging on the basis of the encoding methods,which systematically clarifies the characteristics of encoding and amplification methods for living cell imaging and in situ cell imaging. Finally,the challenges of multiplex detection in living cells and future perspectives of nucleic acids-encoded amplification are summarized and discussed.