Paired design of dCas9 as a systematic platform for the detection of featured nucleic acid sequences in pathogenic strains.

We developed an in vitro DNA detection system using a pair of dCas9 proteins linked to split halves of luciferase. Luminescence was induced upon co-localization of the reporter pair to a ~44 bp target sequence defined by sgRNAs. We used the system to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA with high specificity and sensitivity. The re-programmability of dCas9 was further leveraged in an array design that accesses sequence information across the entire genome.