Dr. Ryan Jackson, Assistant Professor at Utah State University, will present “CRISPR RNA – guided adaptive immunity in bacteriain” at 4:10 p.m. Jan. 8 in Fulmer Hall, Room 201.
Abstract
Outnumbered by virus particles at least 10 to one, bacteria must continuously adapt a diverse arsenal of immune defense systems to survive. Viruses, on the other hand, evolve countermeasures that intercept bacterial immune systems and allow viruses to reproduce.
One of the more sophisticated ways bacteria protect themselves from viruses is with adaptive immune systems encoded within CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) loci and CRISPR-associated genes.
To determine the molecular mechanisms that underpin CRISPR adaptive immune systems and the viral strategies that counteract these immune systems, it was determined that atomic resolution structures of multi-subunit CRISPR RNA-guided complexes with x-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy.
The structures reveal how multiple proteins present a CRISPR derived RNA (crRNA) to interrogate and destroy viral DNA, and show how virally encoded proteins, in turn, block CRISPR immunity.
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