[Research progress of the CRISPR-Cas system in the detection and elimination of antibiotic resistance genes]

The abuse of antibiotics has led to increasingly severe antibiotic resistance, which poses a serious threat to global public health security. Therefore, the rapid detection and effective elimination of antibiotic resistance genes are crucial for controlling the spread of drug-resistant bacteria. Conventional methods for detecting antibiotic resistance genes, such as PCR, quantitative real-time PCR, and isothermal amplification, have shortcomings including time-consuming procedures, labor intensiveness, high costs, and poor specificity. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find new solutions to combat bacterial resistance, making the development of novel and efficient technologies for detecting and eliminating antibiotic resistance genes. In recent years, gene editing technology has become a research hotspot. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas proteins) consisted of the CRISPR-Cas system. As one of the adaptive immune systems in prokaryotes, it possesses unique sequence targeting ability and high sensitivity, which enable it to accurately recognize and cleave target nucleic acid sequences. Thus, it shows great potential in the detection and elimination of antibiotic resistance genes. This review summarizes the classification, structures, and action mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas systems, elaborates on the application of different CRISPR-Cas systems in the detection and elimination of antibiotic resistance genes, and finally discusses the challenges faced by this technology and its future development directions, aiming to provide new ideas for addressing antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria.