Structural principles of CRISPR-Cas enzymes used in nucleic acid detection.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR)-based technology has revolutionized the field of biomedicine with broad applications in genome editing, therapeutics and diagnostics. While a majority of applications involve the RNA-guided site-specific DNA or RNA cleavage by CRISPR enzymes, recent successes in nucleic acid detection rely on their collateral and non-specific cleavage activated by viral DNA or RNA. Ranging in enzyme composition, the mechanism for distinguishing self- from foreign-nucleic acids, the usage of second messengers, and enzymology, the CRISPR enzymes provide a diverse set of diagnosis tools in further innovations.