Community post

Xiaorong Wu (The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC) and colleagues published a new paper in mBio on how phage T4 escapes CRISPR attack by 'minihomology' (very short stretches of sequence identity) recombination and repair. This is a novel counterdefense mechanism by which phage T4 restores its genomic DNA following CRISPR cleavage. This subtle functional tuning of pre-existing DNA metabolism leads to a profound impact on phage survival.