Human immunity is an incredibly complex system that has to be very carefully regulated by the body. We need our immune systems to be able to leap into action when our health is threatened by pathogens ...

Over the past two decades, the immune system has attracted increasing attention for its role in fighting cancer. As researchers have learned more and more about the cancer-immune system interplay, ...

CRISPR-Cas systems are adaptive immune systems found in prokaryotes that defend against invading nucleic acids through CRISPR RNA-guided cleavage. Type V CRISPR-Cas (Cas12) systems, in particular, ...

It acts as a sort of molecular fumigator to battle phages and plasmids. CRISPR-Cas9 has long been likened to a kind of genetic scissors, thanks to its ability to snip out any desired section of DNA ...

In nature, the best-known CRISPR system, CRISPR-Cas9, cuts any RNA or DNA it recognizes as foreign, and thereby protects bacteria from viral attacks. Another CRISPR system, one that is relatively ...

“I would venture to say that bacteria and archaea use everything that you can imagine for the purpose of defence — and then, some that you cannot,” said Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the ...

Viktor Mamontov, Alexander Martynov, Natalia Morozova, Anton Bukatin, Dmitry B. Staroverov, Konstantin A. Lukyanov, Yaroslav Ispolatov, Ekaterina Semenova, Konstantin Severinov Proceedings of the ...

LONDON — In this case, it was neither the chicken nor the egg that came first. Rather, it started with some specially engineered cells in a lab. The chicken cells had had their genomes edited, not to ...

But it turns out that CRISPR systems have more than one strategy in their toolkit. A mechanism originally discovered in bacteria, where it has operated as an adaptive immune system for eons, CRISPR is ...