ArticleNature biotechnology2025
An experimental census of retrons for DNA production and genome editing.
Article in Nature biotechnology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Detectrons convert transient RNA sequences into stable DNA barcodes for high-throughput analysis of RNA-dependent processes.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Characterization of defensome genes and mobile genetic Elements in different types of pasture soil agroecosystems from the Brazilian Amazon.International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology · 2026Article
- Discovery and engineering of retrons for precise genome editing.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Higher-order assembly of a type IX retron enables exploitation for designer antimicrobials.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Genome editing of phylogenetically distinct bacteria using cross-species retron-mediated recombineering.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Structure and mechanism of antiphage retron Eco2.Nature structural & molecular biology · 2026Article
- Structural basis for retron co-option of anti-phage ATPase-nuclease.Nature structural & molecular biology · 2026Article
- Architecture and mechanism of a dual-enzyme retron system in prokaryotic immunity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Structural mechanism of the Retron-Eco7 anti-phage defense system.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Structurally related phage helicases trigger type III-A3 retron-mediated anti-phage defense across diverse tailed phage families.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Article
- New retron systems from environmental bacteria identify triggers of anti-phage defense and expand tools for genome editing.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- MitoScribe single-cell molecular recorder logs graded signaling dynamics into mitochondrial DNA.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Structural basis of the RNA-mediated Retron-Eco2 oligomerization.Cell discovery · 2025Article
- TIGR-Tas: A family of modular RNA-guided DNA-targeting systems in prokaryotes and their viruses.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- High throughput variant libraries and machine learning yield design rules for retron gene editors.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Recent advances in site-specific transgene insertion into the maize genome using recombinases and genome editing endonucleases.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Review
- Phage-triggered reverse transcription assembles a toxic repetitive gene from a noncoding RNA.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- High Throughput Variant Libraries and Machine Learning Yield Design Rules for Retron Gene Editors.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Retrons are bacterial immune systems that use reverse-transcribed DNA (RT-DNA) to detect phage infection. They are also deployed for genome editing, where they are modified so that the RT-DNA encodes an editing donor. Retrons are common in bacterial genomes, and thousands of unique retrons have been predicted bioinformatically. However, few have been characterized experimentally. We add to the corpus of experimentally studied retrons, finding 62 empirically determined, natural RT-DNAs that are not predictable from the retron sequence alone. We synthesize >100 previously untested retrons to identify the natural sequence of RT-DNA they produce, quantify their RT-DNA production and test the relative efficacy of editing using retron-derived donors to edit bacterial, phage and human genomes. We observe large diversity in RT-DNA production and editing rates across retrons, finding that top-performing editors are drawn from a subset of the retron phylogeny and outperform those used in previous studies, reaching precise editing rates of up to 40% in human cells.
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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.