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CRISPR–Cas adaptive immune systems are widespread in prokaryotes. In this Progress article, Maxwell and colleagues highlight how phages and other mobile genetic elements inactivate CRISPR–Cas systems using anti-CRISPR proteins and outline evolutionary and biotechnological implications of anti-CRISPR protein activity.
Prokaryotic Argonaute proteins, homologues of eukaryotic Argonaute proteins involved in RNA interference, have recently been demonstrated to mediate host defence in archaea and bacteria. In this Progress article, van der Oost and colleagues explore the structures and biological functions of the prokaryotic Argonaute proteins, and discuss their potential applications in genome editing.
In this Progress article, Buchanan and colleagues discuss recent studies that have advanced our understanding of the structure of the fully assembled β-barrel assembly machinery (BAM) complex and the interactions between the individual components. They also detail the mechanistic insights that have been gained and explore two emerging models for BAM-mediated outer membrane protein biogenesis in bacteria.
