Another set of immune systems for bacteria to defend against bacteriophages (BrxU)

A team of biological scientists from Durham University in the United Kingdom, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool, Northumbria University, and the New England Biological Laboratory, has conducted a new study, hoping to use the new characteristic defense system of bacteria to compare the human genome Change
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Undergraduates from Durham University are also conducting this research to prove the complex working mechanism of bacterial innate immunity
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Bacteria have evolved a variety of defense systems to protect themselves from viruses.

The researchers demonstrated that the two defense systems work in complementary ways to protect bacteria from bacteriophages
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A system protects bacteria from phages, but these phages do not have any modification to their DNA
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Other phages can modify their DNA to avoid the first defense system
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The researchers constructed extremely detailed three-dimensional images of BrxU to better understand how it protects the phage with modified DNA
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BrxU has the potential to become another useful biotechnology tool because the same DNA modifications that BrxU recognizes appear throughout the human genome and are altered in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases
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The senior author of the study, associate professor of the Department of Biological Sciences at Durham University, and Liszt Institute Prize winner Dr.
Tim Bloer said: "It is very important to be able to identify modified DNA because it is found in the DNA of the human genome.
A similar modification
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This extra layer of information, the "epigenome," changes as we grow, and also changes in cases of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases
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"If we can develop BrxU as a biotechnical tool for mapping this epigenome, it will change our understanding of the adaptive information that controls our growth and disease progression
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The study’s lead author, Dr.
David Picton, and his colleagues’ findings were published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research
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As part of the Microbiology Symposium that aims to provide research-led teaching, their task is to isolate new bacteriophages for research
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The phages used in the experiment were collected from the Weir River, University Pond and other waterways around Durham
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Original search: "The phage defence island of a multidrug resistant plasmid uses both BREX and type IV restriction for complementary protection from viruses" by David Picton, Yvette Luyten, Richard Morgan, Andrew Nelson, Darren Smith, David Dryden, Jay Hinton and Tim Blower , 17 October 2021, Nucleic Acids Research .

DOI: 10.