An ultrasensitive and point-of-care sensor for the telomerase activity detection

Abstract Telomerase owns great application potential in diagnosis, therapy, prognosis,and drug screening of cancers. Thus, the ultrasensitive and point-of-care detection of telomerase activity meets the clinical demands extremely. Here, a sensor based on telomerase extends activators to unlock the ssDNase activity of CRISPR/Cas12a was created for the first time to detect the telomerase activity. Based on the fluorescence or CRISPR/Cas12a-based lateral flow assay, we achieve the ultrasensitive and point-of-care detection of telomerase activity in MCF-7 cells low to 57 cells·mL-1 and 5.7×102 cells·mL-1 in about one hour, respectively. Besides, the detection of telomerase activity in different subtype breast cancer cells indicates that the proposed sensor possesses potential in the classification of breast cancer cell subtypes.