Team:CCU Taiwan/Project/Description




Inspiration

During our brainstorming session back in Dec 2018, an astounding event occurs in Kinmen, Taiwan where a large amount of pig carcasses was brought to the coastline by the ocean waves. What caught our attention is the fact that after preliminary testing, the carcasses tested positive for ASFV. This event serves as a reminder of the severity of the ASFV plague in mainland China. Since then, the plague has spread across East and South East Asia.

In Taiwan, Pigs are regarded as an important part of the daily diet. Currently there are around 5.5 million pigs in Taiwan. If the plague spread to Taiwan, the effects towards the Taiwanese society and the domestic economy will be unmeasurable, taken into account the massive dependency of the population towards products that are pig oriented. To prevent this tragedy to happen in the future, we came out with a consensus to do something regarding the medical test for ASF Virus.



The ASFV

In 1907, a fatal infectious disease struck Kenya, Africa. The Virus which causes the disease was first described in 1921, and given the name African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV), in context of the host of the virus. When swine comes into contact with ASFV, the virus incubates inside the body of swine. After 4 - 19 days of incubation, the virus starts to attack leukocyte, paralyses immune system and result in acute hemorrhagic disease. The mortality rate of the infected hosts is a staggering 100%.



The Spreading of ASFV

The plague is highly infectious, the reason behind this infectiousness is due to the fact that there are multiple ways that the virus may infect a new host. The paths of infection include all forms of discharge by the host, equipment and other objects such as food that has come into contact with an infected host. Since 2005, there are a total of 50 countries that have reported encountering ASFV, these countries range from neighboring countries of Kenya and some as far as China in Asia. The spreading of ASFV is mainly caused by the transportation of infected swine and its secretion, and also pig oriented products.



Contagious Pigs

Usually, epidemic prevention authorities will take action only after they are notified by the pig farmers due to the mass dying of pigs. Due to the late response towards the incident, the virus might have widely spread. The cause of the problem has to be blamed on the inefficient epidemic control system. Currently, the common way to detect ASFV is to send blood sample to the lab to undergo an Elisa test or a PCR test. Elisa test detects and measures if the blood contains antibodies related to ASF virus, which means that only sick pigs can be detected with this particular test.In the other side, PCR test is a highly time consumed process which require DNA of ASF virus to be copied until there is enough of it for analysis and detection. Thus, we came out with an idea of developing a rapid screening device, to allow epidemic prevention authorities to do rapid medical test before the pigs get sick.

CRISPR-Cas12a

CRISPR-Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats associated protein) technology is a quantum-leap in this new era of molecular biology which is found that it is capable of removing, adding or altering gene within organisms. In our project design, we are particularly using CRISPR-Cas12a in our screening device to detect ASFV sequence. CRISPR-Cas12a is a type V CRISPR protein, cleaves double-stranded DNA. The most significant part is it also processes single-stranded DNA threading activity. It triggers the aggregation CRISPR-Cas12a and nanoparticles. This specificity accesses our signal labelling and amplifying session after the detection of our target genome.