The Panoptes system uses decoy cyclic nucleotides to defend against phage.
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- 6 giorni fa
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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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