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Microbiology

How bacteria get spacers from invaders

Nature volume 519, pages 166–167 (2015)Cite this article

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Bacteria use CRISPR–Cas systems to develop immunity to viruses. Details of how these systems select viral DNA fragments and integrate them into bacterial DNA to create a memory of invaders have now been reported. See Articles p.193 & p.199

Less than a decade ago, immunological memory was regarded as a feature unique to vertebrates — scientists ridiculed the idea that bacteria might be able to 'remember' viruses that attack them. Yet the almost inconceivable concept of bacterial immunological memory has since been shown to exist after all1,2,3. Two papers in this issue, by Heler et al.4 (page 199) and Nuñez et al.5 (page 193), published on Nature's website today, report major advances in our understanding of the molecular mechanism of this phenomenon.

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Figure 1: The bacterial immune response.

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  1. Ido Yosef and Udi Qimron are in the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.,

    Ido Yosef & Udi Qimron

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  1. Ido Yosef
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  2. Udi Qimron
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Correspondence to Udi Qimron.

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Yosef, I., Qimron, U. How bacteria get spacers from invaders. Nature 519, 166–167 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14204

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