Thousands of phages found to have CRISPR gene editing system

Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Los Angeles, working with a colleague from Vilnius University, have found evidence of thousands of phages with DNA strands that should allow them to conductgene editing on other viruses. The paper has been published.

Some of the researchers on this same team discovered in 2012 that it was possible to reprogram the CRISPR-Cas9 in order to modify other organisms' genes. Findings show that many types ofbacteria use CRISPR-Cas systems to fight infections. bacteria can cut and remove strands of DNA from viruses and store them in their own genomes if it attacks again

Researchers have found that some viruses have the same machinery, but it's not very common. The researchers wanted to know the actual prevalence.

The work involved analyzing the DNA of thousands of phages, which are types of Viruses that attackbacteria. More than 6000 of them were found by the researchers.

The researchers think that the DNA snippets they found were probably stolen frombacteria and that they could be used to ward off otherbacteria. There is more work that needs to be done. The researchers took a closer look at some of the genes and found that some were more efficient than others. Scientists could use the finding to modify cells for human use. It is possible to use systems found in phages to modify genes where current systems are too large.

More information is available from Basem Al-Shayeb et al. 10.1016/j.cell.020.

Journal information: Cell

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