Antimicrobial resistance is a public health burden with worldwide impacts and was recently identified as one of the major causes of death in 2019. Fosfomycin is an antibiotic commonly used to treat urinary tract infections, and resistance to it in Enterobacteriaceae is mainly due to the metalloenzyme FosA3 encoded by the fosA3 gene. In this work, we adapted a CRISPR-Cas9 system named pRE-FOSA3 to restore the sensitivity of a fosA3+Escherichia coli strain. The fosA3+E. coli strain was generated by transforming synthetic fosA3 into a nonpathogenic E. coli TOP10. To mediate the fosA3 disruption, two guide RNAs (gRNAs) were selected that used conserved regions within the fosA3 sequence of more than 700 fosA3+E. coli isolates, and the resensitization plasmid pRE-FOSA3 was assembled by cloning the gRNA into pCas9. gRNA_195 exhibited 100% efficiency in resensitizing the bacteria to fosfomycin. Additionally, the edited strain lost the ampicillin resistance encoded in the same plasmid containing the synthetic fosA3 gene, despite not being the CRISPR-Cas9 target, indicating plasmid clearance. The in vitro analysis presented here points to a path that can be explored to assist the development of effective alternative methods of treatment against fosA3+ bacteria.
CRISPR-based diagnostics now detect viral, bacterial, and cancer-associated nucleic acids with sensitivities approaching quantitative PCR; however, their translation to decentralized care rests on computational design and interpretation that current datasets cannot sustain. Pandemic-era Cas12a assays reached 95% positive predictive agreement against reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) at 10 copies/μL, and deep neural networks now design Cas13 detection assays spanning 1933 vertebrate-infecting viruses, ranking candidate guides at Spearman correlations of 0.69 to 0.84 across internal and external validation. Generative deep-learning systems improve single-nucleotide discrimination two- to three-fold, computer vision classifies lateral flow outputs at 96.5% accuracy, and multi-biomarker fusion reaches an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.998 in lung cancer detection. These results mask a narrow data foundation. Cas13a guide prediction still draws from a single screening library of 19,209 guide–target pairs, Cas12a has one published diagnostic model, and signal classifiers almost uniformly validate on single-site cohorts. This review synthesizes mechanistic constraints, predictive and generative models, and point-of-care classifiers, and maps the path beyond this data ceiling. Evolutionary pretraining on RNA corpora and lab-in-the-loop agents that convert model failure into targeted data acquisition define the route forward.