CRISPR-Cas12a-Empowered Electrochemical Biosensor for Rapid and Ultrasensitive Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant

Coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19)is a highly contagious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-CoV-2).The gold standard method for the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 depends on quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction till now,which is time-consuming and requires expensive instrumentation,and the confirmation of variants relies on further sequencing techniques.Herein,we first proposed a robust technique-methodology of electrochemical CRISPR sensing with the advantages of rapid,highly sensitivity and specificity for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 variant.To enhance the sensing capability,gold electrodes are uniformly decorated with electro-deposited gold nanoparticles.Using DNA template identical to SARS-CoV-2 Delta spike gene sequence as model,our biosensor exhibits excellent analytical detection limit(50 fM)and high linearity(R2=0.987)over six orders of magnitude dynamic range from 100 fM to 10 nM without any nucleic-acid-amplification assays.The detection can be completed within 1 h with high stability and specificity which benefits from the CRISPR-Cas system.Furthermore,based on the wireless micro-electrochemical platform,the proposed biosensor reveals promising application ability in point-of-care testing.

Interlayer sensitized van der Waals heterojunction photodetector with enhanced performance

Although photodetection based on two-dimensional(2D)van der Waals(vdWs)P-N heterojunction has attracted extensive attention recently,their low responsivity(R)due to the lack of carrier gain mechanism in reverse bias or zero bias operation hinders their applications in advanced photodetection area.Here,a black phosphorus/rhodamine 6G/molybdenum disulfide(BP/R6G/MoS_(2))photodiode with high responsivity at reverse bias or zero bias has been achieved by using interfacial charge transfer of R6G molecules assembled between heterojunction layers.The formed vdWs interface achieves high performance photoresponse by efficiently separating the additional photogenerated electrons and holes generated by R6G molecules.The devices sensitized by the dye molecule R6G exhibit enhanced photodetection performance without sacrificing the photoresponse speed.Among them,the R increased by 14.8-20.4 times,and the specific detectivity(D^(*))increased by 24.9-34.4 times.The strategy based on interlayer assembly of dye molecules proposed here may pave a new way for realizing high-performance photodetection based on 2D vdWs heterojunctions with high responsivity and fast response speed.