CRISPR/Cas12a-based biosensing platform for precise and efficient screening of CRISPR/Cas9-induced biallelic mutants

CRISPR/Cas9 is a robust tool to manipulate genes in a wide range of species. Although several methods are introduced to identify the CRISPR/Cas9-induced mutations, they are labor-intensive, costly, and not easy to use or were sequence-limited. Moreover, few of them could identify the biallelic mutants that are the desired outcomes of targeted mutagenesis. Recently, a CRISPR/Cas12a-mediated biosensing platform was developed to detect nucleic acids based on the collateral DNA cleavage activity of Cas12a; it was highly sensitive, specific, rapid, and cost-efficient for genotyping, mutation detection, and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) identification, thereby deeming it as an innovative method for screening the CRISPR/Cas9-induced biallelic mutants. Thus, the CRISPR/Cas12a-based biosensing platform has been successfully utilized for screening 23 CRISPR/Cas9-induced biallelic mutants in Thp-1 cells, which were also confirmed by direct sequencing and ELISA. The precision and efficiency of CRISPR/Cas12a-based biosensing platform make it a promising tool for screening of CRISPR/Cas9-induced biallelic mutants in the future.