UC Santa Barbara

The COVID-19 pandemic has created massive demand for widespread, distributed tools for detecting SARS-CoV-2 genetic material. The hurdles to scalable testing include reagent and instrument accessibility, availability of highly-trained personnel, and large upfront investment. Here we showcase an orthogonal pipeline we call CREST (Cas13-based, Rugged, Equitable, Scalable Testing) that addresses some of these hurdles. Specifically, CREST pairs commonplace and reliable biochemical methods (PCR) with low-cost instrumentation, without sacrificing detection sensitivity. By taking advantage of simple fluorescence visualizers, CREST allows for a binary interpretation of results. CREST may provide a point- of-care solution to increase the distribution of COVID-19 surveillance.