Application of CRISPR-Based Diagnostic Tools in Detecting SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Abstract As the world is struggling to control the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, healthcare infrastructure and diagnosis have emerged as two major issues. Among the eight immediate research actions identified by the WHO, development of rapid point-of-care diagnostics is the first one. This chapter describes the current most widely practiced diagnostic techniques, for SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), with a special focus on the rapidly emerging clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-based tools for the diagnostic purpose. Although reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and antigen-based rapid testing still remain as the two possible conceptual alternatives to test active infection and seroprevalence, each of them have individual demerits such as requirement of infrastructure support, poor predictive capabilities, and commonly yielding false outcomes. In this chapter, we will discuss several CRISPR-based alternative diagnostic tools that have been developed for detecting different infectious pathogens, with a particular focus on SARS-CoV-2 infection, and compare them with other diagnostic tools for identifying significant advantages or shortcomings.