New Paper in Angewandte Chemie International Edition

PAM-Engineered Toehold Switches as Input-Responsive Activators of CRISPR-Cas12a for Sensing Applications

N. Bagheri,    A. Chamorro,    A. Idili and  A. Porchetta

Toehold Switch DNA presenting a locked anti-PAM in the loop are designed to control Cas12a activity in response to different molecular  inputs.  The hairpin  to  duplex  reconfiguration  triggered  by  co-localization-based  displacement  reactions  provides  a means to control the accessibility of the PAM and as a consequence Cas12a activity. We demonstrate the rapid, one-pot detection of antibodies and small molecules with high sensitivity and specificity.

#Cas12,  #CRISPR  biosensors, #strand displacement reaction