Escherichia coli (E. coli) in most cases causes severe harm to the human health, therefore, its detection in foods is of paramount importance. Various techniques are used in identifying E. coli and some of them are anyhow time consuming or even need a heavily equipped laboratory. In the recent past, the discovery of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) molecular diagnostic technology is trendy. This paper introduces a new method employing CRISPR based systems for the identification of E. coli in various sample food types within a short span of time. The method takes advantage of the CRISPR-associated proteins and integrates it with nucleic acid amplification, to detect even little amounts of DNA of E. coli. Using a host of experiments we have found that the use of CRISPR-Cas systems for identification of E. coli holds a high specificity and sensitivity, and this has accordingly reduced the time for pathogen detection. Essentially, this innovation could be useful in Read more improve the current approaches on food hygiene and elimination of food borne diseases outbreak.

Key Words

CRISPR, E. coli detection, food safety, molecular diagnostics, rapid detection