Last year Mr. Eytan Stibbe was the second Israeli astronaut to exit Earth. Eytan conducted many experiments during his stay at the International Space Station, and one of them was ours! He tested the functionality of the CRISPR-Cas12a-based molecular detection system. This system involves two enzymatic reactions, and now we can report that the system works very well in microgravity, opening the door for developing Cas12a-based diagnostics kits for astronauts!
Read our full paper here; it's open access!
We use Cas12 to distinguish between the two closely related tomato viruses, ToMV and ToBRFV.
The work was done together with Ziv Spiegelman's lab from our institute.
Find the preprint here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.16.435580v1
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