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 1 h, 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.