As an aside, it is interesting that unexpected nucleic acid binding from proteins is (yet again) a place where current structure prediction is falling short despite looking obvious in hindsight. There's probably many "dark matter" DNA/RNA binders that predictive tools are systematically blind to.
Phages invented sgRNAs before humans!! 🧬
Obviously, for mischief… 😈
Loved seeing this story unfold!
🎊 New Preprint from phagefoundry.org ! Super excited to share our latest work on generating systematic phage-MDR P. aeruginosa interaction dataset & use of ML to predict phage susceptibility & phage cocktails from target genome sequences alone, w validations www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Chemical inactivation of a bacterial immune system de-domesticates a temperate phage and promotes its spread
bioRxiv from Joseph Gerdt at Indiana University
with @annadragos.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#PhageSky
Ancient wars between microbes gave us key immune defenses | @science.org | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti... #microsky #virosky #immunosky
A better understanding of battles between bacteria and viruses could inspire new medicines
This is so cool -- multifunctional-ization of biofilm eDNA with a single protein!
Two ideas for anyone interested below:
Idea 2: It seems like ecDNA would be an interesting "genetics-free" bait to discover microbial-community and immune-interfacing machines in biofilm matrixes. I bet there are a lot of cool biological machines to discover this way in metaG/microbiome dark matter!
