The CRISPR technology commonly used for genome editing was originally based on bacterial defense mechanisms that arose to protect against bacteriophages, though their mode of activation has largely eluded scientists. In the course of understanding this phenomenon, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research have identified two proteins in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, that activate bacterial and archaeal immune defense systems. The team published their report on August 12 in Science.
This research was a follow-up to a 2020 study, also in Science, where researchers identified several thousand bacterial immune defense genes that protect against bacteriophages. Both papers were led by Alex Gao, a Stanford biochemist who coauthored the newer study while a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He tells The Scientist that he and his colleagues were intrigued by the similarity of the prokaryotic gene ...
