The Panoptes system uses decoy cyclic nucleotides to defend against phage.
JENA BIOTECH NEWS
Bacteria have developed countless ways to defend themselves against viral attacks. In this Nature paper, Sullivan and colleagues discovered a completely new mechanism: the Panoptes system[1]. In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the “all-seeing guardian”, a giant with a hundred eyes who never fully slept, because some of his eyes were always open. Panoptes literally means “the all-seeing” and that’s exactly what the system does - it watches constantly for viral sabotage rather than for infection itself, an ever-alert sentinel inside the bacterial cell. It senses when a virus (phage) interferes with the cell’s signaling molecules, turning the virus’s own strategy into a trigger for defense.
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