Crispr-Resistant Viruses Build ‘Safe Rooms’ to Shield Genomes from Enzymes | Hacker News Reader

Crispr-Resistant Viruses Build ‘Safe Rooms’ to Shield Genomes from Enzymes

ucsf.edu

134 pointsdddddaviddddd17 comments

A beautiful study with interesting implications for the evolution of the different CRISPR systems. Congrats to the team. I'm curious how this study, published in Nature, is different than this study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-019-0612-5

Published in Nature Microbiology. Maybe just the institution?

The two studies show essentially the same findings, but despite their co-publication, it looks like the discovery was documented by Mendoza et al. over a year in advance of Malone et al.

Mendoza et al. spent over a year (!) in review versus two weeks for Malone et al.

Mendoza et al. submitted to Nature: 2018-07-16 posted to bioRxiv: 2018-07-17 accepted: 2019-10-11 published: 2019-12-09

Malone et al. posted to bioRxiv: 2019-09-25 submitted to Nature Microbio: 2019-10-03 accepted: 2019-10-17 published: 2019-12-09

What are you implying?

What are the dates implying? Are they implying anything?

I wonder if neclei were "invented" by viruses as those safe rooms. There are already theories that DNA was first invented by viruses to protect against cleaving by RNAases, and the presence of UDNA viruses suggests it. It would also explain how DNA had immediate selective advantage over RNA.

In the book The Vital Question the author argues that nuclei were invented to protect against the original mithocondrial DNA:

> Introns are the result of "a barrage of genetic parasites" that early eukaryotes faced from their own endosymbionts; nuclei evolved as a defence against this, allowing spliceosomes to remove introns from transcribed messenger RNA before ribosomes can translate them into proteins.

This is a super cool idea I hadn't hear before. Can you share any good references?

I just imagine Jeff Goldblum intoning "You thought you had control?".

I am a slow coder, I try things out, experiment and keep my old code somewhere. Eventually I hit on a problem and think "hey I wrote something that did that... where was it".

Now give me a billion years of trying out code. I will have some serious tricks :-)

I was thinking MC Hammer in parachute pants doing his signature dance but JG works too.

Evolution and life is a constant “spy vs. spy” cat & mouse game to capture and defend energy. For example, industrial-scale meat agriculture is suicidal and omnicidal because it is a perfect “Petri dish” bioreactor accelerating the evolution of pandemic diseases and antibiotic resistance... it should be illegal because it’s an anthropogenic risk we created unnecessarily. It’s interesting how viruses could be considered life if you count that they do replicate, albeit parasitically, and they do defend energy by making more of themselves (whereas lions eat deer or humans eat potato chips and get fat and/or reproduce).

Life is the sci-fi "grey-goo" with an energy budget.

Life is nothing but molecular nanotechnology we didn't invent and can't control... yet.

The “nothing but” in that sentence makes it false.

Yep, emergence cannot be ignored

Somewhat related: You may enjoy the song "Nanobot" from the acapellascience channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc

Sounds similar to viral capsid development, likely the same process occurs in "safe room" construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid `Some viruses, such as bacteriophages, have developed more complicated structures due to constraints of elasticity and electrostatics.`

Would be interesting to do some sort of high throughput screening of Jumbo Phages versus bacteria or CRISPR versus viruses to see what other systems might exist.

The hunt will never end..

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