Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Bradde S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7071851 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Bradde Serena S Nourmohammad Armita A Goyal Sidhartha S Balasubramanian Vijay V
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20200218 10
Some bacteria and archaea possess an immune system, based on the CRISPR-Cas mechanism, that confers adaptive immunity against viruses. In such species, individual prokaryotes maintain cassettes of viral DNA elements called spacers as a memory of past infections. Typically, the cassettes contain several dozen expressed spacers. Given that bacteria can have very large genomes and since having more spacers should confer a better memory, it is puzzling that so little genetic space would be devoted b ...[more]