Enhanced chemiluminescence imaging sensor for ultrasensitive detection of nucleic acids based on HCR-CRISPR/Cas12a

CRISPR/Cas systems have ignited increasing attention in accurate and sensitive nucleic acids detection. In this work, we proposed the first CRISPR/Cas12a-based chemiluminescence enhancement biosensor by employing HCR amplifying strategy (CLE-CRISPR) for nucleic acids detection, which shows the advantages of high sensitivity and specificity, low-cost, visual imaging by comparison to reported biosensors. Upon the DNA target recognition, the activated CRISPR/Cas12a enabled randomly cutting initiator DNA (intDNA) into vast short products, which could not trigger the toehold-mediated DNA-strand displacement reaction (TSDR) with MB@crDNA. Thereby, the terminus of crDNA induced the hybridization chain reaction (HCR) with the coexistence of two hairpins (H1 and H2), forming a long double-stranded DNA framework. The attached streptavidin-AP yielded a conspicuous CL signal or visual imaging directly related to the DNA target concentration. The proposed CLE-CRISPR platform exhibited excellent sensitivity, with a relatively low detection limit at 3 pM for synthetic DNA target and single copy detection for plasmid by combining recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) kit. We further validated the practical application of this platform using HPV clinical samples, achieving superior sensitivity and specificity of 88.89% and 100%, respectively. We believe that this work not only extends the application scope of CRISPR/Cas12a, but also devotes a new approach for clinical diagnosis.

Automated summary

In this study, a chemiluminescence enhancement biosensor based on CRISPR/Cas12a with HCR amplifying strategy was developed for nucleic acids detection. The biosensor showed high sensitivity and specificity, low cost, and visual imaging. The detection limit for synthetic DNA target was 3 pM. The biosensor also exhibited excellent sensitivity and specificity when applied to HPV clinical samples.