Application of the Novel CRISPR / Cas Technology in Diagnosis of COVID-19 Strains

The novel Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused respiratory infection, resulting in more than two million deaths globally and hospitalizing thousands of people until 2021. A considerable percentage of the SARS-CoV-2 positive patients are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic carriers, facilitating the viral spread in the community by their social activities. Hence, it is critical to have access to commercialized diagnostic tests to detect the infection in the earliest stages, monitor the disease, and follow up the patients. Recently, CRISPR-based diagnostics have emerged as attractive alternatives to quantitative real-time PCR due to their faster turnaround time and their potential to be used in point-of-care testing scenarios. Clustered short palindrome repeats with regular intervals, abbreviated as CRISPR, and functions as a self-defense system for prokaryotes, detecting particular pathogenic nucleic acid, interfering with the functions of exoteric DNA, and protecting them against foreign invaders. Finally, we discuss challenges and future prospects of CRISPR-Cas system based diagnostic platforms in biomedicine, hoping to further inspire the development of biomedical diagnostics.