Inlay

I’m very fortunate to be at the 2025 CRISPR Meeting in Christchurch to share our latest work on the quirky Cas12a diversity. What an amazing crowd and location! @crisprmeeting.bsky.social

The diversity of microbial defenses is amazing! Type IV Thoeris system shows an ancient innate immunity mechanism which uses a TIR protein to make N7-cADPR, activating a caspase-like protease to block phages. Learn more: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Preprint alert: Putative phages with dsRNA genomes. Intriguing what bacteria they may infect. Nature’s diversity continues to astonish! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fragmented and primer Ligated DsRNA Sequencing (FLDS) was used to reconstruct five complete, bisegmented RNA genomes of paraxenoviruses, a group of viruses that was previously identified in the ocean ...

Caspase family proteases and Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR)-domain proteins have central roles in innate immunity and regulated cell death in humans. We describe a bacterial immune system comprisin...

The Russian spelling and pronunciation of Kyiv throughout the ages was no accident. While the name gets its origin from an empire that predates Russia, a series of policies by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that sought to Russify Ukraine and the Ukrainian language distorted its roots.

Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 05 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41579-026-01284-0The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Argonautes and antiviral STAND NTPases, became central to eukaryotic innate immunity. In this Comment, we hypothesize that the cause of this paradox is the drastic reduction of horizontal gene transfer rate in eukaryotes.

For decades, if not more, English speakers the world over referred to Ukraine’s capital as Kiev, pronouncing it kee-yev. Few people knew they were using the Russian name for the city. The city is pro...

Our paper is out! Hiding in plain sight among Cas12a nucleases, Cas12a3 cleaves not its RNA target but the 3′ ends of tRNA. Huge thanks to all who made this possible, especially the Beisel lab, Biao & Dirk for the structure, & @sebastianglatt.bsky.social for all things tRNA. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Cas12a3 nucleases constitute a distinct clade of type V CRISPR–Cas bacterial immune systems that preferentially cleave the 3′ tails of tRNAs after recognition of target RNA to induce growth arres...

The #CRISPR “gene scissors” have become an important basis for genome-editing technologies in many fields. 🧬✂️ A team from the #HIRI in Würzburg has now demonstrated that these CRISPR-Cas systems are even more versatile than previously thought. Read more: www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/newsroom/...

#CRISPR kann mehr als gedacht: Ein Team des @helmholtz-hiri.bsky.social hat mit Forschenden des HZI & aus den USA eine neue Nuklease entschlüsselt: In @nature.com zeigen sie, dass Cas12a3 Transfer-Ribonukleinsäuren schneidet, um infizierte Zellen lahmzulegen. www.helmholtz-hzi.de/media-center...

Team from Würzburg, Braunschweig, and the US identifies Cas12a3 nuclease showing precise activity | Study just published in Nature