Abstract: Food safety incidents caused by foodborne pathogens have attracted widespread attention. In order to ensure food safety, it is essential to adopt effective detection means. The emerging clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas) system, consisting of CRISPR and Cas, is an acquired immune system widely found in bacteria and archaea, which efficiently and specifically recognizes and cleave exogenous nucleic acids and is more efficient than conventional techniques for detecting pathogenic bacteria. Based on a review of recent progress in research on CRISPR/Cas biosensing system coupled with isothermal amplification technology, this paper summarizes the classification and principle of CRISPR/Cas and recent progress in the application of CRISPR/Cas coupled with isothermal amplification in foodborne pathogen detection, and discusses the prospects and challenges for CRISPR/Cas coupled with isothermal amplification in the real-time detection of foodborne pathogens. We expect that this review will provide a reference for the further development of CRISPR/Cas biosensing system.

Key words: foodborne pathogens; CRISPR/Cas system; isothermal amplification; nanomaterials; functional nucleic acids