A Universal CRISPR/Cas12a-Assisted Methodology Based on Duplex Switch Structure to Detect Multiple Types of Targets

Recent years, molecular detection technology has been playing an unprecedentedly important role in disease prevention and public health. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) systems such as CRISPR/Cas12a and CRISPR/Cas13a, have been increasingly used in the detection of nucleic acid molecules because of its collateral cleavage ability in recent years. Herein, we develop a universal CRISPR/Cas12a-assisted methodology based on a nucleic acid duplex switch structure that can distinguish different categories of targets, such as DNA, RNA and small molecules. It is worth noting that for nucleic acid detection, this method can significantly identify single base substitutions with high specificity, compared with other Cas12a-assisted biosensing systems. The experimental results suggest that this method has great specificity for different targets, promising to be applied to rapid molecular diagnosis.