CRISPR-Cas systems target a diverse collection of invasive mobile genetic elements in human microbiomes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Bacteria and archaea develop immunity against invading genomes by incorporating pieces of the invaders' sequences, called spacers, into a clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) locus between repeats, forming arrays of repeat-spacer units. When spacers are expressed, they direct CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins to silence complementary invading DNA. In order to characterize the invaders of human microbiomes, we use spacers from CRISPR arrays that we had previously assembled from shotgun metagenomic datasets, and identify contigs that contain these spacers' targets.

Results

We discover 95,000 contigs that are putative invasive mobile genetic elements, some targeted by hundreds of CRISPR spacers. We find that oral sites in healthy human po

SUBMITTER: Zhang Q 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4053933 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature