The highly diverse antiphage defence systems of bacteria

In this Review, Georjon and Bernheim provide an overview of the molecular diversity of the most recently discovered bacterial antiphage defence systems and discuss their evolution and the ecological impact of their diversity. Bacteria and their viruses have coevolved for billions of years. This ancient and still ongoing arms race has led bacteria to develop a vast antiphage arsenal. The development of high-throughput screening methods expanded our knowledge of defence systems from a handful to more than a hundred systems, unveiling many different molecular mechanisms. These findings reveal that bacterial immunity is much more complex than previously thought. In this Review, we explore recently discovered bacterial antiphage defence systems, with a particular focus on their molecular diversity, and discuss the ecological and evolutionary drivers and implications of the existing diversity of antiphage defence mechanisms.

Automated summary

In this review, the authors provide an overview of the molecular diversity of recently discovered bacterial antiphage defence systems and discuss their evolution and ecological impact.