Scientists find new bacterial antivirus tools in giant gene database
Toro N
Crispr
This research is about bacteria fighting viruses in soil and water microbes, not plants directly, so it has little bearing on your garden or houseplants today.
Bacteria have tiny built-in defense systems called retrons that help them fight off viruses, kind of like a bacterial immune system. Researchers dug through a massive online library of bacterial genetic information and found two brand-new versions of these defense tools that scientists didn't know existed before. This doesn't involve plants at all, but discoveries like this sometimes lead to new lab techniques that plant scientists borrow later on.
Key Findings
Researchers surveyed retron reverse transcriptases across the SPIRE metagenome collection, spanning over 100,000 processed microbial metagenomes
Two candidate new lineages, named TXI_C2like and TXI_noncan_h, were identified as type XI-like retrons lacking the typical protease domain
Retron distribution was strongly shaped by both bacterial taxonomy and ecological habitat, with some lineages restricted to specific phyla
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists mining a huge database of bacterial genomes found new variants of 'retrons,' tiny DNA-copying tools bacteria use to fight off viruses, expanding the toolkit researchers can borrow for future genetic engineering.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Landscape of retron diversity across the SPIRE microbial metagenome resource reveals candidate novel type XI-like lineages.
Retrons are bacterial genetic elements encoding a specialized reverse transcriptase (RT) that synthesizes multicopy single-stranded DNA and are increasingly recognized as components of bacterial an...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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