Point-of-Care Pathogen Detection with CRISPR-based Programmable Nucleic Acid Binding Proteins.

Dhar, Bidhan; Steimberg, Nathalie; Mazzoleni, Giovanna

The contemporary discovery of extremely versatile engineered nucleic acids binding proteins has transformed a brave world in the genome-editing scientific area. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)- mediated programmable nucleic acids-binding proteins have brought a revolution in the diagnostic platforms. The groundbreaking finding that bacteria and archaea harbored prokaryotes have transmitted adaptive immunity through CRISPR and CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins has driven to revolutionize advances in molecular biology. Importantly, advances in gene editing focus how expanding visions into CRISPR-Cas biology are revolutionizing the area of molecular diagnostics for identification of DNA and RNA in emerging microbiological pathogens, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) identifications as well as cell-free mutation. Recent advancements that include improvements in multiplexing and quantitative capabilities, and instrument-free detection of nucleic acids will potentially leverage the introduction of these novel technologies to bacterial and viral detection at the point-of-care (POC). In this review, we highlight the fundamental features of CRISPR/Cas based molecular diagnostic technologies and summarize a vision of next applications for identifications of pathogens in Point-of-care (POC) settings.