ABSTRACT
In the past few years, the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) applications in medicine and molecular biology have broadened. CRISPR has also been integrated with microfluidic-based biosensors to enhance the sensitivity and selectivity of medical diagnosis due to its great potentials. The CRISPR-powered microfluidics can help quantify DNAs and RNAs for different diseases such as cancer, and viral or bacterial diseases among others. Here in this review, we discussed the main applications of such tools along with their advantages and limitations.
ABSTRACT
Detection of pathogens, e.g., bacteria and viruses, is still a big challenge in analytical medicine due to their vast number and variety. Developing strategies for rapid, inexpensive, specific, and sensitive detection of the pathogens using nanomaterials, integrating with microfluidics devices, amplification methods, or even combining these strategies have received significant attention. Especially, after the health-threatening COVID-19 outbreak, rapid and sensitive detection of pathogens became very critical. Detection of pathogens could be realized with electrochemical, optical, mass sensitive, or thermal methods. Among them, electrochemical methods are very promising by bringing different advantages, i.e., they exhibit more versatile detection schemes and real-time quantification as well as label-free measurements, which provides a broader application perspective. In this review, we discuss the recent advances for the detection of bacteria and viruses using electrochemical biosensors. Moreover, electrochemical biosensors for pathogen detection were broadly reviewed in terms of analyte, bio-recognition and transduction elements. Different fabrication techniques, detection principles, and applications of various pathogens with the electrochemical biosensors were also discussed.