Recent progress in CRISPR-based microfluidic assays and applications

In the past few years, CRISPR-based (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-based) detection techniques have arisen in the field of bioanalysis, molecular biology and clinical diagnosis. However, there are still some limitations, such as high cost, high technical requirements, complexity, cross contamination, lack of quantification strategies, etc. Microfluidic platforms, as emerging technologies, have the potential to take CRISPR-based technology to the new level in the future. In this review, we illustrate the recent progress as well as our work and collaborative work in CRISPR-based microfluidic detection assays based on the categories of microfluidic chips, including paper-based microfluidics, centrifugal microfluidics, digital microfluidics, electrochemical microfluidics and wearable microfluidics, mainly focusing on how microfluidic platforms improve CRISPR-based detection method in the aspect of visualization, detection throughput, anti-contamination, simple operation, sensitivity, specificity and quantification, etc. And we outlook the future trends of CRISPR-based microfluidic detection methods in both innovation of CRISPR-based and design of microfluidic platforms. • Summarizing the limitation of current CRISPR-based diagnostics. • Elaborating in detail about how five different types of microfluidics improve the performance of current CRISPR-based assays. • Outlooking the future development of CRISPR-based microfluidic assays and their applications.