A highly adaptable platform powered by CRISPR-Cas12a to diagnose lumpy skin disease in cattle

Lumpy skin disease (LSD) in cattle, a transboundary viral disease of cattle once restricted to Africa, has been spreading to many European and Asian countries in the past decade with huge economic losses. This emerging worldwide threat to cattle warrants the development of diagnostic methods for accurate disease screening of suspected samples to effectively control the spread of LSD. In this study, we integrated pre-amplification and three kinds of sensor systems with CRISPR and therefore established an LSD diagnosis platform with highly adaptable and ultra-sensitive advantages. It was the first CRISPR-powered platform that could identify lumpy skin disease virus from vaccine strains of goat pox virus and sheep pox virus. Its limit of detection (LOD) was one copy/reaction after introducing PCR or recombinase-aided amplification (RAA). Moreover, this platform achieved a satisfactory overall agreement in clinical diagnoses of 50 samples and its reproducibility and accuracy were superior to other qPCR methods we tested. The whole diagnostic procedure, from DNA extraction to the results, could complete in 5 h with a total cost of 1.7-9.6 $/test. Overall, this CRISPR-powered platform provided a novel diagnostic tool for portable, ultra-sensitive, rapid, and highly adaptable disease screening of LSD and may be an effective method to control this transboundary disease's spread.