434: Killer Carries Compact Cas

This episode: Large phage discovered that contains a compact version of the CRISPR/Cas defense/gene editing system!

Download Episode (5.9 MB, 8.6 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Stenotrophomonas virus IME13

News item Takeaways CRISPR/Cas systems have made a lot of things in gene editing much easier in certain organisms. It's almost as easy as just getting the cells to produce the Cas protein and putting in an RNA sequence to tell it where to go! But in some cases, these requirements are too much to work well.   In this study, a more compact version of CRISPR/Cas was discovered in large bacteriophages. These systems help the viruses compete with other viruses and defend against host defenses sometimes. The Cas protein is half the size of the standard Cas most used in gene editing, and it has fewer other requirements to function in new cells, so it could be better in versatility and potential in applications with strict space constraints. Journal Paper: Pausch P, Al-Shayeb B, Bisom-Rapp E, Tsuchida CA, Li Z, Cress BF, Knott GJ, Jacobsen SE, Banfield JF, Doudna JA. 2020. CRISPR-CasΦ from huge phages is a hypercompact genome editor. Science 369:333–337.

Other interesting stories:

• Example of how cooperation becomes more beneficial than independence
• Programming bacteria to detect and kill specific other microbes in a mixed community (paper)

 

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