Surveillance and genotyping of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage water by Cas12a-facilitated portable plasmonic biosensor

Infectious diseases severely threaten public health and global biosafety. In addition to transmission through the air, pathogenic microorganisms have also been detected in environmental liquid samples, such as sewage water. The various methodologies utilized in the clinical diagnosis of pathogens are often time-consuming and cost-ineffective, and their detection limits are not satisfactory for processing environmental samples, which contain only scant amounts of microorganismal DNA/RNA.