India, Dec. 5 -- It's elementary! Feluda, Satyajit Ray's iconic Indian detective, will follow his godfather Sherlock Holmes.

What's intriguing is their association, breaching nearly 100 years between them, in cracking the mysteries of nature that roil mankind.

In the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, the Feluda test, abbreviated from FnCas9 Editor Linked Uniform Detection Assay, became one of the world's first CRISPR-based diagnostic tests. It was being developed and carried out by two researchers at CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB).

CRISPR - an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat - helped the researchers find a rapid, highly accurate tool that could detect the SARS-CoV-2 vir...