{"id":39999,"date":"2026-04-03T13:48:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T13:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=39999"},"modified":"2026-04-03T13:48:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T13:48:05","slug":"treasure-trove-of-antiviral-proteins-could-inspire-powerful-molecular-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=39999","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Treasure trove\u2019 of antiviral proteins could inspire powerful molecular tools"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Escherichia coli<\/i> produce a diverse array of proteins to help protect them against bacteriophages (green). <\/span>Credit: M. Maeder\/Dept of Microbiology, Biozentrum\/SPL<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/picture><\/figure>\n

Bacteria have been fighting off viruses using a huge arsenal of molecular weaponry that scientists did not know about \u2014 until now.<\/p>\n

In studies published in Science <\/i>today, two research teams describe the machine-learning algorithms they developed to screen bacterial genomes and identify proteins that are involved in protecting the microorganisms against viral invaders. Their analyses identified hundreds of thousands of potential antiviral proteins, which researchers could harness to develop innovative biotechnologies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a treasure trove for any biochemist,\u201d says Jos\u00e9 Antonio Escudero, a microbiologist at the CSIC National Center for Biotechnology in Madrid, who was not involved in either study.<\/p>\n

Previous discoveries of antiviral immune systems in bacteria include the gene-editing system CRISPR\u2013Cas9 and DNA-snipping proteins called restriction enzymes. Researchers have repurposed both systems to create molecular tools for genetic engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a hope that maybe there\u2019s a next generation of molecular tools that would come from some of these new systems,\u201d says Michael Laub, a microbiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a co-author on one of the studies1<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Protein defences<\/h2>\n

When looking at the genome of a bacterium, \u201cmost of it is still dark matter\u201d, says Escudero. \u201cThere are many things that we don\u2019t know how they work or what they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previous studies had confirmed that bacteria use more than 250 proteins to protect themselves from viral infections. Researchers had suggested that the true bacterial immune system was much larger and more diverse than this, \u201cBut the big question was how much diversity and how can we actually predict it at scale?\u201d, says Aude Bernheim, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a co-author on one of the papers2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bacteria use a decoy defence molecule to set a trap for viruses<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/article>\n<\/p>\n

In their study2<\/a><\/sup>, Bernheim and her colleagues trained deep-learning models on protein and genomic data to predict antiviral systems. Their goal was to identify the \u201cfull breadth of diversity of bacterial immunity\u201d, says Bernheim. The analysis estimated that, on average, 1.5% of genes in a bacterial genome correspond to proteins that are involved in antiviral immunity \u2014 three times more than previous estimates. And more than 85% of the predicted protein families were not previously associated with immunity. Laboratory experiments on two bacterial species \u2014 Escherichia coli <\/i>and Streptomyces albus <\/i>\u2014 confirmed the presence of 12 \u2018antiphage\u2019 systems that ward off viruses called bacteriophages that infect bacteria. The systems had not previously been linked to antiviral defence.<\/p>\n

In their paper, Laub and his colleagues1<\/a><\/sup> designed a separate machine-learning tool called DefensePredictor, which predicts bacterial immune proteins on the basis of gene and protein data from 17,000 bacterial genomes.<\/p>\n

When tested on 69 diverse strains of E. coli<\/i>, DefensePredictor identified 624 proteins as defence-related immune systems, more than 100 of which were previously unknown. In lab experiments, Laub and his colleagues confirmed the defence activity in 42 cases.<\/p>\n

Both studies come to the same conclusion: that researchers have been \u201cmassively underestimating the number of defence systems\u201d, says Laub. The research \u201cbrings to light how many systems are out there still to be characterized\u201d, he adds.<\/p>\n

The discoveries include \u201chundreds of genes that we didn\u2019t know were related\u201d, says Escudero.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Escherichia coli produce a diverse array of proteins to help protect them against bacteriophages (green). Credit: M. Maeder\/Dept of Microbiology, Biozentrum\/SPL Bacteria have been fighting off…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}