Prof. and Head of Phage-host interactions (Phi) lab. Phage defences, counter-defences, CRISPR-Cas, toxin-antitoxin. FRSNZ / James Cook Fellow
Peter Fineran
Phages invented sgRNAs before humans!! 🧬
Obviously, for mischief… 😈
Loved seeing this story unfold!
www.linkedin.com/posts/peter-...
1/9 New preprint from the Sternberg Lab in collaboration with the Nishimasu Lab! We uncover how the DRT3 antiphage immune system pairs two reverse transcriptases, one RNA-templated and one protein-templated, to build a double-stranded DNA effector. doi.org/10.64898/202...
Happy to share our latest pre-print on the Druantia defense system.
We find that Type III Druantia uses a cooperative helicase-nuclease mechanism to sense and degrade replication-associated forked DNA structures.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A🧵
(1/6) Thrilled to share this story! In our preprint from my PhD in the @kranzuschlab.bsky.social, with help from the Hatfull lab and @soreklab.bsky.social, we discover RyDEP, a phage-encoded RyR-domain glycosidase that allows phages to evade Thoeris defense. Highlights below! doi.org/10.64898/202...
The paper on my Ph.D. work is fully online! We used a ribozyme that barcodes 16S rRNA to track the transduction range of phage P1 in a synthetic community and real wastewater communities, while diving deeper into the unique range conferred by P1s two tail fibers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Our paper is out in Nature Microbiology: functional analysis of 80 phage sponges, revealing new sponges that inhibit bac immunity by binding the immune signals cCMP, cUMP and N7-cADPR
Thanks to all coauthors and our collaborators at the Kranzusch Lab. Congrats Romi!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A nice piece at @science.org covers the exploding field of bacterial immunity, and how it led to the understanding that components of the human immune system evolved from bacterial defenses against phage
www.science.org/content/arti...
Very proud of this work and all the efforts from my team and collaborators on this! You can now use DGRs for in vivo targeted hypermutagenesis in E. coli. We also included some early proof of concept in Yeast thanks to @seth-shipman.bsky.social !
Been a real please to host Kerwyn Huang from Stanford University as a Fulbright Association scholar in Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Otago University of Otago. It has been a great few month...
📣Huge preprint 🔔
Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.
Bacteriophages are the most abundant life form on earth and can be applied to eliminate or engineer bacteria. Here, authors demonstrate RNA barcoding as a high throughput tool to measure bacteriophage...
www.nature.com
Peter Fineran
Rafael Pinilla-Redondo (Rafa)
A better understanding of battles between bacteria and viruses could inspire new medicines
