The Yin Kun team from the Department of Environmental Health and Ecological Security, School of Global Health, Advanced Science, published a review...

In recent years, infectious diseases such as new crowns and monkeypox have emerged one after another, seriously affecting the healthy life of human beings
.
Nucleic acid-based molecular amplification tests are often used as the gold standard
for the diagnosis of infectious diseases.
As a self-protection mechanism for prokaryotes, the CRISPR/Cas system is also an acquired immune mode
against viral invasion in most bacteria and archaea.
Since 2012, researchers have used CRISPR to knock out, mutate, replace or add
DNA sequences to organisms.
CRISPR for gene editing has the characteristics of low cost, simple construction, convenient operation, and wide application, so researchers call it "gene magic scissors"
.
CRISPR's ability to accurately and specifically recognize sequences has been applied to more and more fields, and since 2017, CRISPR technology has risen rapidly in the field of molecular diagnostics, with the advantages
of being fast, accurate, economical, and low device dependent.
Microfluidic technology combined with CRISPR/Cas molecular detection methods has played an important role
in the prevention and control of infectious diseases due to its rapid, efficient and accurate characteristics.

Recently, Xie Yi, a master's student in the Department of Environmental Health and Ecological Security, School of Tropical Diseases, National Center for Tropical Diseases, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, published "Clustered Regularly Interspaced short palindromic repeats-Based Micro?uidic System in Infectious Diseases" in the journal Advanced Science Diagnosis: Current Status, Challenges, and Perspectives" systematically summarizes the recent results of CRISPR/Cas technology combined with microfluidic systems in molecular diagnosis of infectious diseases, and puts forward the main challenges and future prospects
in this field.

This article reviews the latest progress of microfluidic systems based on CRISPR/Cas technology in the diagnosis of infectious diseases, summarizes the traditional and easy-to-combine portable sample pretreatment methods and the mechanisms and applications of various CRISPR/Cas systems in biosensing, and introduces the latest progress of microfluidic systems based on CRISPR/Cas technology in molecular diagnosis of infectious diseases, including paper-based microfluidics, digital microfluidics, wearable microfluidics, etc
。 Finally, this paper extracts the key unsolved challenges in this field, including how to improve detection sensitivity, realize multiplex detection and high-throughput screening, develop independent portable detection platforms, realize real-time monitoring, and carry out disease early warning, etc.
, and propose possible combinations of molecular diagnostics in the future, and propose solutions to
achieve effective prevention and immediate warning of global infectious disease pandemics.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine-National Center for Tropical Diseases, School of Global Health Master Xie Yi and Master Student Li Huimin are co-first authors, and Professor Yin Kun, Assistant Researcher Xiuleshan and Professor Guo Xiaokui of the School of Global Health are co-corresponding authors of the paper, which was supported
by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Shanghai Natural Science Foundation of China.