ArticleNature ecology & evolution2024
Viperin immunity evolved across the tree of life through serial innovations on a conserved scaffold.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Discovery of an Antiviral Electron Transfer Process to Create Catalytically Self-Sufficient Viral Restriction Factors.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Diversity, ecology, cell biology and evolution of the Asgard archaea.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Tmn blocks phage spread via plasmolysis and triggers synergistic defence responses.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Diversity and evolution of archaeal immune strategies.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Diving into the hidden viral world of marine protists.Journal of virology · 2026Review
- Manipulation of the nucleotide pool in human, bacterial and plant immunity.Nature reviews. Immunology · 2026Review
- Review
- Serial innovations by Asgard archaea shaped the DNA replication machinery of the early eukaryotic ancestor.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Structural insights from active site variants and β-8 loop interactions in viperin-like enzymes.Structure (London, England : 1993) · 2025Article
- Viperin: A Multifunctional Protein in Antiviral Immunity and Disease Pathogenesis.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Nature should be the model for microbial sciences.Journal of bacteriology · 2024Review
- Asgard archaea defense systems and their roles in the origin of eukaryotic immunity.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The immune modules conserved across the tree of life: Towards a definition of ancestral immunity.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- RNA-guided RNA silencing by an Asgard archaeal Argonaute.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Eukaryotic CD-NTase, STING, and viperin proteins evolved via domain shuffling, horizontal transfer, and ancient inheritance from prokaryotes.PLoS biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Evolutionary arms races between cells and viruses drive the rapid diversification of antiviral genes in diverse life forms. Recent discoveries have revealed the existence of immune genes that are shared between prokaryotes and eukaryotes and show molecular and mechanistic similarities in their response to viruses. However, the evolutionary dynamics underlying the conservation and adaptation of these antiviral genes remain mostly unexplored. Here, we show that viperins constitute a highly conserved family of immune genes across diverse prokaryotes and eukaryotes and identify mechanisms by which they diversified in eukaryotes. Our findings indicate that viperins are enriched in Asgard archaea and widely distributed in all major eukaryotic clades, suggesting their presence in the last eukaryotic common ancestor and their acquisition in eukaryotes from an archaeal lineage. We show that viperins maintain their immune function by producing antiviral nucleotide analogues and demonstrate that eukaryotic viperins diversified through serial innovations on the viperin gene, such as the emergence and selection of substrate specificity towards pyrimidine nucleotides, and through partnerships with genes maintained through genetic linkage, notably with nucleotide kinases. These findings unveil biochemical and genomic transitions underlying the adaptation of immune genes shared by prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Our study paves the way for further understanding of the conservation of immunity across domains of life.
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