
Crispr-Resistant Viruses Build ‘Safe Rooms’ to Shield Genomes from Enzymes - dddddaviddddd
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2019/12/416116/crispr-resistant-viruses-build-safe-rooms-shield-genomes-dna-dicing-enzymes
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dannykwells
A beautiful study with interesting implications for the evolution of the
different CRISPR systems. Congrats to the team. I'm curious how this study,
published in Nature, is different than this study:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-019-0612-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-019-0612-5)

Published in Nature Microbiology. Maybe just the institution?

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digital_plumber
The two studies show essentially the same findings, but despite their co-
publication, it looks like the discovery was documented by Mendoza et al. over
a year in advance of Malone et al.

Mendoza et al. spent over a year (!) in review versus two weeks for Malone et
al.

Mendoza et al. submitted to Nature: 2018-07-16 posted to bioRxiv: 2018-07-17
accepted: 2019-10-11 published: 2019-12-09

Malone et al. posted to bioRxiv: 2019-09-25 submitted to Nature Microbio:
2019-10-03 accepted: 2019-10-17 published: 2019-12-09

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fooker
What are you implying?

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loa_in_
What are the dates implying? Are they implying anything?

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petjuh
I wonder if neclei were "invented" by viruses as those safe rooms. There are
already theories that DNA was first invented by viruses to protect against
cleaving by RNAases, and the presence of UDNA viruses suggests it. It would
also explain how DNA had immediate selective advantage over RNA.

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ertert345
In the book The Vital Question the author argues that nuclei were invented to
protect against the original mithocondrial DNA:

> _Introns are the result of "a barrage of genetic parasites" that early
> eukaryotes faced from their own endosymbionts; nuclei evolved as a defence
> against this, allowing spliceosomes to remove introns from transcribed
> messenger RNA before ribosomes can translate them into proteins. _

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lifeisstillgood
I just imagine Jeff Goldblum intoning "You thought you had control?".

I am a slow coder, I try things out, experiment and keep my old code
somewhere. Eventually I hit on a problem and think "hey I wrote something that
did that... where was it".

Now give me a billion years of trying out code. I will have some serious
tricks :-)

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duelingjello
I was thinking MC Hammer in parachute pants doing his signature dance but JG
works too.

Evolution and life is a constant “spy vs. spy” cat & mouse game to capture and
defend energy. For example, industrial-scale meat agriculture is suicidal and
omnicidal because it is a perfect “Petri dish” bioreactor accelerating the
evolution of pandemic diseases and antibiotic resistance... it should be
illegal because it’s an anthropogenic risk we created unnecessarily. It’s
interesting how viruses could be considered life if you count that they do
replicate, albeit parasitically, and they do defend energy by making more of
themselves (whereas lions eat deer or humans eat potato chips and get fat
and/or reproduce).

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GenerocUsername
Life is the sci-fi "grey-goo" with an energy budget.

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TeMPOraL
Life is nothing but molecular nanotechnology we didn't invent and can't
control... yet.

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erikpukinskis
The “nothing but” in that sentence makes it false.

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unkulunkulu
Yep, emergence cannot be ignored

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FrozenVoid
Sounds similar to viral capsid development, likely the same process occurs in
"safe room" construction.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid)
`Some viruses, such as bacteriophages, have developed more complicated
structures due to constraints of elasticity and electrostatics.`

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dddddaviddddd
Would be interesting to do some sort of high throughput screening of Jumbo
Phages versus bacteria or CRISPR versus viruses to see what other systems
might exist.

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agumonkey
The hunt will never end..

