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The highly diverse antiphage defence systems of bacteria

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 21, pages 686–700 (2023)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 18 October 2023

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Abstract

Bacteria and their viruses have coevolved for billions of years. This ancient and still ongoing arms race has led bacteria to develop a vast antiphage arsenal. The development of high-throughput screening methods expanded our knowledge of defence systems from a handful to more than a hundred systems, unveiling many different molecular mechanisms. These findings reveal that bacterial immunity is much more complex than previously thought. In this Review, we explore recently discovered bacterial antiphage defence systems, with a particular focus on their molecular diversity, and discuss the ecological and evolutionary drivers and implications of the existing diversity of antiphage defence mechanisms.

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Fig. 1: Diversity of bacterial antiphage defences.
Fig. 2: Antiphage molecular mechanisms.
Fig. 3: Phage resistance mechanisms target all steps of antiphage defence.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to A. Millman, G. Ofir and F. Rousset for their very useful feedback on early versions of this manuscript. The authors also thank all members of the Molecular Diversity of Microbes Lab for their comments and suggestions during the writing process. H.G. and A.B. are supported by the ERC Starting Grant (PECAN 101040529). To promote gender equality and inclusivity in research, we are convinced of the importance of acknowledging gender bias in research article citation. Using a custom script available on our github (https://github.com/mdmparis/Estimating_gender_bias_in_references), we estimated that among the 139 references cited in the main text, approximately 45% (63) have a female first author and approximately 15% (21) have a female last author.

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    Héloïse Georjon & Aude Bernheim

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Georjon, H., Bernheim, A. The highly diverse antiphage defence systems of bacteria. Nat Rev Microbiol 21, 686–700 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-023-00934-x

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