Light-Start CRISPR-Cas12a Reaction with Caged crRNA Enables Rapid and Sensitive Nucleic Acid Detection

The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system is a promising platform for nucleic acid detection. Regulating the CRISPR reaction would be extremely useful to improve the detection efficiency and speed of CRISPR diagnostic applications. Here, we have developed a light-start CRISPR-Cas12a reaction by employing caged CRISPR RNA (crRNA). When combined with recombinase polymerase amplification, a robust photocontrolled one-pot assay is achieved. The photocontrolled one-pot assay is simpler and is 50-fold more sensitive than the conventional assay. This improved detection efficiency also facilitates the development of a faster CRISPR diagnostic method. The detection of clinical samples demonstrated that 10-20 min is sufficient for effective detection, which is much faster than the current gold-standard technique PCR. We expect this advance in CRISPR diagnostics to promote its widespread detection applications in biomedicine, agriculture, and food safety.