Authors : Shefali Mehta, Shefali Mehta, Aditi Mehta, Aditi Mehta
DOI : 10.18231/j.ijcbr.2021.033
Volume : 8
Issue : 3
Year : 2021
Page No : 150-152
The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas (CRISPR – Associated Proteins) systems are prokaryotic adaptive immune mechanisms that are used for cleaving the invading nucleic acids in nature. Due to this reason, the CRISPR-based tools are used in numerous applications like genome and transcriptome engineering, gene therapy, epigenome editing and many others. In addition, the issue of errors in these tests is also increasing at a very rapid pace, due to which their reliability and efficiency and effectiveness are getting severely hampered. Therefore, it may not be wrong to say that there is a still a lot more room for improvement and development to enable, widespread, rapid, and scalable testing of the COVID-19 virus. In this regard, the RT-qPCR tests can be used as a routine molecular diagnostic method for detecting any COVID-19 symptoms. However, there are various limitations that mar the use and implementation of the RT-qPCR tests. But a few of these shortcomings can be overcome by using alternative molecular diagnostic methods like the CRISPR based tests.