Early detection of an infectious bacterium is essential to preventing a potential outbreak or minimizing the impact of an active infection. Although prevailing methods are effective in many aspects, they suffer from being complex, expensive or insensitive. These drawbacks prevent their applications by the general public or under resource-limited settings. Therefore, developing rapid, accurate, inexpensive and sensitive methods for pathogenic bacterial detection remains a major research focus in the global research community. In recent years, functional nucleic acids, particularly DNA aptamers and DNAzymes, have been increasingly examined as the recognition element for bacterial biomarkers and whole bacterial cells. Significant efforts have also been made to utilize these affinity probes for the design of simple and cost-effective biosensors for bacterial detection. This review highlights the key achievements in this area, identifies important challenges, and provides thoughts on future directions.

早期发现传染性细菌对于预防潜在的爆发或最大程度地减少主动感染的影响至关重要。尽管流行的方法在许多方面都是有效的，但它们具有复杂，昂贵或不灵敏的缺点。这些缺点阻止了它们在一般公众中或在资源有限的环境下的应用。因此，开发快速，准确，廉价和敏感的病原细菌检测方法仍然是全球研究界的主要研究重点。近年来，功能性核酸，尤其是DNA适体和DNA核酶，已被越来越多地作为细菌生物标志物和整个细菌细胞的识别元件而被研究。还已经做出了巨大的努力来利用这些亲和力探针来设计用于细菌检测的简单且具有成本效益的生物传感器。这篇综述重点介绍了该领域的主要成就，指出了重要的挑战，并对未来的方向提出了想法。