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Nucleic acid detection — it's elementary with SHERLOCK!

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 18, pages 392–393 (2017)Cite this article

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SHERLOCK (specific high sensitivity enzymatic reporter unlocking) is based on two critical features of the Cas13a RNase (previously called C2c2). Firstly, because Cas13a is an RNA-guided RNase it can be reprogrammed with CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) to recognise an RNA target of choice, enabling it to act as an RNA sensor. Secondly, Cas13a has a 'collateral effect' when it recognizes its target RNA; in addition to cleaving its specific target, it also cleaves nearby non-targeted RNAs. In SHERLOCK, this collateral effect is harnessed to cleave and activate a quenched fluorescent reporter RNA to indicate the presence of the target RNA of interest.

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References

  1. Gootenberg, J. S. et al., Nucleic acid detection with CRISPR-Cas13a/C2c2. Science 356, 438–442 (2017)

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  1. Dorothy Clyde
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Clyde, D. Nucleic acid detection — it's elementary with SHERLOCK!. Nat Rev Genet 18, 392–393 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2017.40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2017.40

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