We are pleased to announce that Prof. Matthias Bochtler (Laboratory of Genome Engineering IBB PAS), together with Prof. Gintautas Tamulaitis (Vilnius University), have been awarded a grant in the NCN programme DAINA 3, intended for projects involving Polish-Lithuanian collaboration. They will jointly carry out the project “Novel effectors and terminators of antiviral CRISPR-Cas signaling pathways.”

CRISPR systems provide bacteria with pathogen-specific immunity. The well-recognized CRISPR systems such as the Cas9 system recognize and cleave invading nucleic acids of an invader directly. However, it is now clear that the detection of invading nucleic acids also triggers the biosynthesis of cyclic oligoadenylates that act as “danger signals” to illicit an anti-phage response that does not necessarily rely on DNA or RNA cleavage. In the DAINA project, Prof. Matthias Bochtler and Prof. Gintautas Tamulaitis – the discoverer of the “danger signals” – will study the regulation of antiphage signaling and characterize downstream effectors.