November 28, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Horvath and his Team Set up Experiment to Test Immunity Hypothesis
Horvath after returning from the conference
in Holland where he came across the CRISPR for the first time in his life began
to closely scrutinize his own collection for microbes for them.
Did his own microbes have in them these so
called novel stuff called CRISPRs?
Yes, they did have in them this fascinating
entity though of course, not all colonies had them.
Now Horvath had two sets of microbes with
him – one set that had in their genome these CRIPSR elements and the other that
didn’t.
This gave Horvath a chance to carry out another
experiment as he could use one set as control group in relation to the other
set.
Horvath now decided to study whether those
that did have in possession this unique genetic makeup were more resistant to
phage infections or not.
I will not go into the details of those
experiments buy by 2004 he was convinced of the positive correlation of CRISPR
elements with immunity to phage infections.
His findings were further corroborated by
other researchers who we had discussed earlier.
In 2005 Horvath set up a team to directly
test the hypothesis that CRISPR was an adaptive immune system of bacteria
against phages.
His team included Rodolphe Barrangou, a
young Ph.D. then employed with Danisco food company and Sylvain Moineau from
the Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
Moineau’s specialty was phage biology and
he too had had a stint in the food industry working with Unilever Corporation
before he decided that he preferred the environment of the academia far better.
These men started doing some serious
genetic fiddling to prove that CRISPR did indeed provide immunity to microbes.
They chose a very specific strain of
Streptococcus thermophilus that was well investigated and which was known to be
susceptible to two specific bacteriophages.
What they did further is better explained
in the abstract of the paper that was published in March 2007 issue of journal
Science.
The paper was titled, “CRISPR provides
acquired resistance against viruses in prokaryotes.”
The authors were Barrangou R, Fremaux C,
Deveau H, Richards M, Boyaval P, Moineau S, Romero DA and of course Horvath P.
The short abstract precedes the paper as
follows:
“Clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats (CRISPR) are a distinct feature of the genomes of most
Bacteria and Archaea and are thought to be involved in resistance to
bacteriophages.
We found that, after viral challenge,
bacteria integrated new spacers derived from phage genomic sequences.
We shall continue with the abstract of this
paper in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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