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Professor at the University of Murcia Antonio Sanchez Amat has published, together with researchers from the universities of Stanford and Texas in Austin, an article in Science magazine where a new type of CRISPR-Cas systems that can be used by bacteria described defend against infection viruses possessing ribonucleic acid (RNA) as their genetic material.
The CRISPR sequences (palindromic repeats and regularly interspaced Short Agrupadas) are generally associated with Cas genes encoding proteins;
CRISPR-Cas systems confer resistance to bacteria against attack by viruses.
In the work published in Science detailing the existence of a novel CRISPR-Cas system in marine bacteria Marinomonas Mediterranean, a microorganism isolated in the coastal waters of the region of Murcia and extensively characterized at the molecular level by the research group of Sanchez Amat.
The importance of this finding is that the first system is described which provides a mechanism of resistance against RNA viruses (single genetic material of some viruses).
"The CRISPR-Cas system to capture small RNA fragments as 'genetic memory' to defend against infection of new viruses, and is also a novel mechanism of transfer of genetic information from RNA to DNA," says profesorde University Murcia.
With this work a new field of study of RNA viruses, which are quite unknown opens.
The first author of the article is the researcher Sukrit Silas (Stanford University), the research group Andrew Z. Fire, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2006. It has also participated lab Alan M. Lambowitz (University of Texas at Austin) .
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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