ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
CRISPR-Cas immunity leads to a coevolutionary arms race between Streptococcus thermophilus and lytic phage.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- From hijackers to architects: the role of prophages in bacterial genome evolution.Journal of bacteriology · 2026Review
- Hawaiian geothermal fumaroles contain diverse and novel viruses.Microbiology spectrum · 2026Article
- Hawaiian Geothermal Fumaroles Contain Diverse and Novel Viruses.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Host Competitive Asymmetries Accelerate Viral Evolution in a Microbe-Virus Coevolutionary System.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Assessing the Role of Bacterial Innate and Adaptive Immunity as Barriers to Conjugative Plasmids.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Punctuated virus-driven succession generates dynamical alternations in CRISPR-mediated microbe-virus coevolution.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Building pyramids against the evolutionary emergence of pathogens.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- My host's enemy is my enemy: plasmids carrying CRISPR-Cas as a defence against phages.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Transient eco-evolutionary dynamics early in a phage epidemic have strong and lasting impact on the long-term evolution of bacterial defences.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- CRISPR-Cas provides limited phage immunity to a prevalent gut bacterium in gnotobiotic mice.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Article
- Extensive diversity and rapid turnover of phage defense repertoires in cheese-associated bacterial communities.Microbiome · 2022Article
- Epidemiological and evolutionary consequences of different types of CRISPR-Cas systems.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Dairy streptococcal cell wall and exopolysaccharide genome diversity.Microbial genomics · 2022Article
- Functional strain redundancy and persistent phage infection in Swiss hard cheese starter cultures.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- CRISPR-Cas systems restrict horizontal gene transfer in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Characterization of 67 Confirmed Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats Loci in 52 Strains ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Bacteriophage - A Promising Alternative Measure for Bacterial Biofilm Control.Infection and drug resistance · 2021Review
- It is unclear how important CRISPR-Cas systems are for protecting natural populations of bacteria against infections by mobile genetic elements.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Review
- Evolutionary Ecology and Interplay of Prokaryotic Innate and Adaptive Immune Systems.Current biology : CB · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
CRISPR-Cas is an adaptive prokaryotic immune system that prevents phage infection. By incorporating phage-derived 'spacer' sequences into CRISPR loci on the host genome, future infections from the same phage genotype can be recognized and the phage genome cleaved. However, the phage can escape CRISPR degradation by mutating the sequence targeted by the spacer, allowing them to re-infect previously CRISPR-immune hosts, and theoretically leading to coevolution. Previous studies have shown that phage can persist over long periods in populations of Streptococcus thermophilus that can acquire CRISPR-Cas immunity, but it has remained less clear whether this coexistence was owing to coevolution, and if so, what type of coevolutionary dynamics were involved. In this study, we performed highly replicated serial transfer experiments over 30 days with S. thermophilus and a lytic phage. Using a combination of phenotypic and genotypic data, we show that CRISPR-mediated resistance and phage infectivity coevolved over time following an arms race dynamic, and that asymmetry between phage infectivity and host resistance within this system eventually causes phage extinction. This work provides further insight into the way CRISPR-Cas systems shape the population and coevolutionary dynamics of bacteria-phage interactions. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The ecology and evolution of prokaryotic CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.