Human immune proteins protect against phage infection - fantastic hypothesis and fantastic discovery!
Koonin & team dive deep into YprA-family defence systems that define “SPIDER” elements: satellite phage-like defence islands that overlap with the GIs we showed are transferred by jumbo phages. They're packed with ecologically relevant genes. The stuff that moves matters!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...
Bacteriophages hijack 2′,3′-cNMPs to enhance transposase-mediated phage DNA integration in Acinetobacter baumannii | Science Advances https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aec7770?af=R
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Phage receptor-binding proteins are known for their LEGO-like modularity, but we still do not fully understand their evolutionary potential and how it shapes phage host range. Our new preprint examines this systematically in Klebsiella phages. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thread 🧵
Bacterial cell division protein FtsZ complexes with a phage protein to activate bacterial immunity
@natmicrobiol.nature.com from Michael Laub & Abel Garcia-Pino
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
NAD to the bone: How bacteria put phages under aRES-t … and how phages fight back
Preview of work IDing aRES, bacterial proteins that deplete cellular NAD+, generating products that cannot be utilized by phage NAD+ regeneration pathways
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Our paper on the YprA family of helicases and their roles in bacterial defence is now out!
We describe ARMADA, a defence system synergise with Druantia and show that both systems spread horizontally on a novel type of mobile genetic element that we call SPIDERs
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
CapK is a bacterial DNA damage-activated kinase that phosphorylates transcriptional repressor CapS to control adjacently-encoded anti-phage immune pathway genes in response to a universal stress signal, DNA damage
@kevincorbett.bsky.social and colleagues
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Very happy to share this preview article written by my postdoc Danny on exciting recent work from @ostermanilya.bsky.social and @soreklab.bsky.social. New bacterial immunity, phage countermeasures, and a double pun combo in the title.
Improved fractionation strategies can identify antibiotics with previously unseen scaffolds and mechanisms, exemplified by manikomycin from Streptomyces rimosus, which acts by targeting the E-site of ...
The activation of an antiphage defence system relies on host factors targeted by phages, a mechanism analogous to the way that eukaryotic innate immune systems detect pathogen-induced perturbations of...
www.nature.com
In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Osterman et al. discover aRES, a new family
of bacterial immune proteins that deplete cellular NAD+, generating cleavage products
that cannot be utilized by canon...
Bacteria and archaea possess an enormous variety of antiviral immune systems that often share homologous proteins and domains. YprA-family helicases a…
www.sciencedirect.com
Bacteria encode numerous stress-response pathways that protect their hosts against both internal and external threats. A key question is how these pathways are regulated, especially anti-phage immune ...
NAD to the bone: How bacteria put phages under aRES-t … and how phages fight back
Preview of work IDing aRES, bacterial proteins that deplete cellular NAD+, generating products that cannot be utilized by phage NAD+ regeneration pathways
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Ákos T Kovács
Jack Bravo
In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Osterman et al. discover aRES, a new family
of bacterial immune proteins that deplete cellular NAD+, generating cleavage products
that cannot be utilized by canon...
How do human cells defend against viruses?
@sgfern.bsky.social discovers that human immune proteins named ISGs target ancient features of replication shared between animal and bacterial viruses – opening analysis of human immunity to the power of bacterial genetics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
