Nasty viruses, costly plasmids, population dynamics, and the conditions for establishing and maintaining CRISPR-mediated adaptive immunity in bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Clustered, Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) abound in the genomes of almost all archaebacteria and nearly half the eubacteria sequenced. Through a genetic interference mechanism, bacteria with CRISPR regions carrying copies of the DNA of previously encountered phage and plasmids abort the replication of phage and plasmids with these sequences. Thus it would seem that protection against infecting phage and plasmids is the selection pressure responsible for establishing and maintaining CRISPR in bacterial populations. But is it? To address this question and provide a framework and hypotheses for the experimental study of the ecology and evolution of CRISPR, I use mathematical models of the population dynamics of CRISPR-encoding bacteria with lytic phage and conjugativ

SUBMITTER: Levin BR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2965746 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature