Framework-Hotspot Enhanced Trans Cleavage of CRISPR-Cas12a for Clinical Samples Detection

The trans-cleavage property of CRISPR-Cas12a system makes it an excellent tool for disease diagnosis. Nevertheless, most methods based on CRISPR-Cas system still require pre-amplification of the target to achieve the desired detection sensitivity. Here we generate Framework-Hotspot reporters (FHRs) with different local densities to investigate their effect on trans-cleavage activity of Cas12a. We find that the cleavage efficiency increases and the cleavage rate accelerates with increasing reporter density. We further construct a modular sensing platform with CRISPR-Cas12a-based target recognition and FHR-based signal transduction. Encouragingly, this modular platform enables sensitive (100 fM) and rapid (<15 min) detection of pathogen nucleic acids without pre-amplification, as well as detection of tumor protein markers in clinical samples. The design provides a facile strategy for enhanced trans cleavage of Cas12a, which accelerates and broadens its applications in biosensing.