Nonequilibrium hybridization-driven CRISPR/Cas adapter with extended energetic penalty for discrimination of single-nucleotide variants

Accurate identification of single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) is critical in clinical diagnostics but remains challenging due to subtle free energy variations, particularly for hard-to-detect SNVs such as wobble base pairs and those in high guanine–cytosine (GC) regions. Here we report a high-energetic-penalty SNV detection (HEPSD) platform that redesigns the hybridization regions of CRISPR RNA (crRNA) in the CRISPR/Cas12a system. This system employs a binary crRNA architecture design that enables the activation of the cleavage activity of Cas12a while amplifying the energetic penalty for single-nucleotide mismatches through nonequilibrium hybridization-driven regulation. Consequently, the entire targeting region of CRISPR/Cas exhibits a marked preference for mutations in genomic DNA, while preventing false activation induced by sequences containing a single mismatched nucleotide. Moreover, HEPSD exhibits exceptional differentiation performance for hard-to-detect SNVs including wobble mutations at extreme GC contents. As proof of principle, profiling of BRAF V600E and EGFR L858R tumor mutations down to a 0.01% variant allele frequency was achieved, enabling accurate discrimination of 132 clinical sample pairs, which showed high consistency with quantitative polymerase chain reaction-based techniques and next-generation sequencing. The proven effectiveness of this platform showcases its potential for clinical molecular diagnostics and expands the fundamental scope of hybridization-based protocols.