When scientists discovered how bacteria protect themselves against viral invaders, called phages, in the early 2000s, little did they know they’d stumbled upon a revolutionary tool researchers could ...

The new CRISPR platform, called ΨDNA, reprograms Cas12 nucleases to recognize and act on RNA using a DNA-based guide scaffold ...

Antibiotics usually save lives—but against some bacteria, they can make things worse. That’s the case with the Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli, where bacterial death releases a flood of a ...

The microbial arms race, in which bacteria battle with each other, viruses, and other microorganisms for space and nutrients, has been ongoing for ages. There are viruses known as bacteriophages that ...

Joe Bondy-Denomy solves a CRISPR caper: this is how a viral protein stows itself on protein factories in bacteria, and destroys a CRISPR protein, designed to kill viruses, while it's being made.

Bacteria contain a wide variety of mechanisms to fend off invaders like viruses. One of these strategies involves cleaving transfer ribonucleic acids (tRNA), which are present in all cells and play a ...

A recent study utilizing cryo-EM advances our understanding of how bacterial immune systems function and reveals new aspects of CRISPR-Cas biology. Researchers at Vilnius University (Lithuania) have ...

What if the Trojan horse had been pulled to pieces, revealing the ruse and fending off the invasion, just as it entered the gates of Troy? That's an apt description of a newly characterized bacterial ...

Antibiotic resistance is racing toward a global crisis, with “superbugs” projected to cause over 10 million deaths annually by 2050. Now, scientists at UC San Diego have unveiled a powerful new CRISPR ...

Scientists at Stanford University have discovered that DRT3, a unique defense system found in bacteria, creates DNA to protect against viral infections. DRT3 is made up of two different enzymes called ...