BioCentury
ARTICLE | Clinical News

Broad team describes CRISPR-based diagnostic tool

April 14, 2017 10:31 PM UTC

In a paper published in Science on Thursday, Feng Zhang and colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard described a new CRISPR-based diagnostic system for rapid point-of-care detection of pathogens such as Zika virus. The new SHERLOCK (Specific High Sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing) method uses the CRISPR-associated 13a (Cas13a) enzyme, rather than Cas9, to create inexpensive paper-based diagnostic tests.

Unlike the DNA-targeted Cas9 enzyme, which only makes cuts at its target site, RNA-targeted Cas13a cuts its target site and then becomes activated to continue cleaving nearby non-targeted RNA. ...