A new tool could reduce the cost of diagnosing infectious diseases. Researchers have developed a new, less expensive means of detecting nuclease digestion, one of the critical steps in many nucleic acid detection applications, such as those used to identify COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. A new study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology shows that this inexpensive tool, called Subak, is effective in determining when nucleic acid cleavage occurs, which happens when an enzyme called nuclease breaks down nucleic acids, such as DNA or RNA, into smaller fragments. The traditional method for identifying nuclease activity, the Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) probe, is 62 times more expensive to produce than the Subak reporter.
