Luciferase-Zinc-Finger System for the Rapid Detection of Pathogenic Bacteria.

Chu Shi, Qing Xu, Yue Ge, Ling Jiang, He Huang

Journal of agricultural and food chemistry 2017 Aug 09

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Rapid and reliable detection of pathogenic bacteria is crucial for food safety control. Here, we present a novel luciferase-zinc finger system for the detection of pathogens that offers rapid and specific profiling. The system, which uses a zinc-finger protein domain to probe zinc finger recognition sites, was designed to bind the amplified conserved regions of 16S rDNA, and the obtained products were detected using a modified luciferase. The luciferase-zinc finger system not only maintained luciferase activity but also allowed the specific detection of different bacterial species, with a sensitivity as low as 10 copies and a linear range from 10 to 104 copies per microliter of the specific PCR product. Moreover, the system is robust and rapid, enabling the simultaneous detection of 6 species of bacteria in artificially contaminated samples with excellent accuracy. Thus, we envision that our luciferase-zinc finger system will have far-reaching applications.

Citation

Chu Shi, Qing Xu, Yue Ge, Ling Jiang, He Huang. Luciferase-Zinc-Finger System for the Rapid Detection of Pathogenic Bacteria. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry. 2017 Aug 09;65(31):6674-6681