How a bacterial immune system gets taken apart
3 September 2024Nature, Published online: 03 September 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02816-5
Investigating small protein inhibitors of CRISPR–Cas — an adaptive immune system in bacteria — has led to the discovery of a mechanism for inhibiting a large macromolecular complex. AcrIF25, an anti-CRISPR protein, blocks CRISPR–Cas activity by sequentially extracting all six Cas7 subunits from this complex.