Medical Xpress March 15, 2025
Bioengineering professor and The Grainger College of Engineering’s Dean, Rashid Bashir, led a team of researchers in a project that’s resulted in new technology that offers rapid, highly sensitive detection of multi-drug-resistant bacteria and other pathogens at low concentrations.
This research was featured in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Researchers designed a CRISPR-based test that rapidly detects low levels of pathogen genetic material in blood. This is done without the need for nucleic acid amplification.
In CRISPR/Cas-based diagnostic tests, guide RNAs bind pathogen DNA or RNA, triggering Cas enzymes to become active and cleave the reporter nucleic acids that fluoresce when cleaved. However, the single CRISPR-based technique does not detect pathogens at low...