Nucleic acid detection is of great significance in many aspects such as early diagnosis, staging, treatment monitoring, prognosis judgment and prenatal gene diagnosis. However, the current nucleic acid testing technology is not only time-consuming and costly, but also has a large workload and cumbersome operation, which significantly affects its application in diagnosis. Hybridization chain reaction (HCR) is a new type of signal amplification technology, which induces two stable DNA hairpin probes to hybridize under constant temperature through single chain DNA (ssDNA), thus amplifying the detection signal and achieving the goal of selective detection of target molecules. Moreover, the hybrid chain reaction can also bind different nanomaterials to detect various target substances such as nucleic acids, proteins, cells, metal ions and so on. In this paper, HCR technology combined with several common nanomaterials (silver nanoparticles, gold nanoparticles, graphene oxide and several other nanomaterials) for nucleic acid detection was summarized, and the future development trend was prospected.