ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The size of the immune repertoire of bacteria.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Design principles of the cytotoxic CD8Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Identification and comparative genomic analysis of prophage sequences and CRISPR‒Cas immunity in Methylococcus genomes: insights into industrial methane bioconversion.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2026Article
- Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications.Chemical reviews · 2026Review
- Design principles of the cytotoxic CD8bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Design principles of the cytotoxic CD8ArXiv · 2025Article
- Review
- Re-Emergence of Bacteriophages and Their Products as Antibacterial Agents: An Overview.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Novel adaptive immune systems in pristine Antarctic soils.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Regulation of bacterial gene expression by non-coding RNA: It is all about time!Cell chemical biology · 2024Review
- Dynamics of CRISPR-mediated virus-host interactions in the human gut microbiome.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Insights from metagenome-assembled genomes on the genetic stability and safety of over-the-counter probiotic products.Current genetics · 2023Article
- Steering and controlling evolution - from bioengineering to fighting pathogens.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2023Review
- Hi-C metagenome sequencing reveals soil phage-host interactions.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Article
- The coordination of anti-phage immunity mechanisms in bacterial cells.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Isolation of a virus causing a chronic infection in the archaeal model organismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Extensive diversity and rapid turnover of phage defense repertoires in cheese-associated bacterial communities.Microbiome · 2022Article
- Toward a next-generation diagnostic tool: A review on emerging isothermal nucleic acid amplification techniques for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious viruses.Analytica chimica acta · 2022Review
- From Bench to Keyboard and Back Again: A Brief History of Lambda Phage Modeling.Annual review of biophysics · 2021Review
- Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Some bacteria and archaea possess an immune system, based on the CRISPR-Cas mechanism, that confers adaptive immunity against viruses. In such species, individual prokaryotes maintain cassettes of viral DNA elements called spacers as a memory of past infections. Typically, the cassettes contain several dozen expressed spacers. Given that bacteria can have very large genomes and since having more spacers should confer a better memory, it is puzzling that so little genetic space would be devoted by prokaryotes to their adaptive immune systems. Here, assuming that CRISPR functions as a long-term memory-based defense against a diverse landscape of viral species, we identify a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of immune memory and effectiveness of response to a given threat. This tradeoff implies an optimal size for the prokaryotic immune repertoire in the observational range.
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