Abstract
Antibiotic resistance is spreading rapidly around the world and seriously impeding efforts to control microbial infections. Although nucleic acid testing is widely deployed for the detection of antibiotic resistant bacteria, the current techniques—mainly based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR)—are time-consuming and laborious. There is an urgent need to develop new strategies to control bacterial infections and the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The CRISPR-Cas system is an adaptive immune system found in many prokaryotes that presents attractive opportunities to target and edit nucleic acids with high precision and reliability. Engineered CRISPR-Cas systems are reported to effectively kill bacteria or even revert bacterial resistance to antibiotics (resensitizing bacterial cells to antibiotics). Strategies for combating antimicrobial resistance using CRISPR (i.e., Cas9, Cas12, Cas13, and Cas14) can be of great significance in detecting bacteria and their resistance to antibiotics. This review discusses the structures, mechanisms, and detection methods of CRISPR-Cas systems and how these systems can be engineered for the rapid and reliable detection of bacteria using various approaches, with a particular focus on nanoparticles. In addition, we summarize the most recent advances in applying the CRISPR-Cas system for virulence modulation of bacterial infections and combating antimicrobial resistance.Graphical
Highlights
The discovery of antibiotics remains one of the most significant milestones in medicine and has widely enabled humans to prevent and treat bacterial infections
The engineered Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 system immunized E. coli against mcr-1 [82]. Wang and his colleagues constructed the recombinant plasmid pMBLcas9-small guide RNA (sgRNA), and the results showed that the genes involved in replication and distribution, binding, antibiotic resistance, and plasmid stability could be used as target genes for the clearance of drug resistance plasmids [73]
We believe that the development of novel CRISPR technologies will enable unprecedented control over eliminating drug-resistant bacteria without targeting beneficial bacteria
Summary
The discovery of antibiotics remains one of the most significant milestones in medicine and has widely enabled humans to prevent and treat bacterial infections. The direct killing effect of the CRISPR-Cas system on pathogenic bacteria is due to its ability to target genes on chromosomes [58] and plasmids [59]. Scientists have used the CRISPR-Cas system to target genes on the plasmids of pathogenic bacteria, especially ARGs, to resensitize drug-resistant bacteria to antibiotics.
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