Heavily Armed Ancestors: CRISPR Immunity and Applications in Archaea with a Comparative Analysis of CRISPR Types in Sulfolobales.

ABSTRACT: Prokaryotes are constantly coping with attacks by viruses in their natural environments and therefore have evolved an impressive array of defense systems. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) is an adaptive immune system found in the majority of archaea and about half of bacteria which stores pieces of infecting viral DNA as spacers in genomic CRISPR arrays to reuse them for specific virus destruction upon a second wave of infection. In detail, small CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) are transcribed from CRISPR arrays and incorporated into type-specific CRISPR effector complexes which further degrade foreign nucleic acids complementary to the crRNA. This review gives an overview of CRISPR immunity to newcomers in the field and an update on CRISPR literature in archaea by c

SUBMITTER: Zink IA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7694759 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature