Coupling immunity and programmed cell suicide in prokaryotes: Life-or-death choices
Name
Koonin_et_al-2017-BioEssays.pdf
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1.17 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
0b4b0d107ef36649a3e2f7f00ee4a93e
Author(s)
Koonin, Eugene V.
Zhang, Feng
Date Issued
December 2016
Journal
BioEssays
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Citation
Koonin, Eugene V., and Zhang, Feng . “Coupling Immunity and Programmed Cell Suicide in Prokaryotes: Life-or-Death Choices.” BioEssays 39, 1 (November 2016): e201600186 © 2016 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Host-pathogen arms race is a universal, central aspect of the evolution of life. Most organisms evolved several distinct yet interacting strategies of anti-pathogen defense including resistance to parasite invasion, innate and adaptive immunity, and programmed cell death (PCD). The PCD is the means of last resort, a suicidal response to infection that is activated when resistance and immunity fail. An infected cell faces a decision between active defense and altruistic suicide or dormancy induction, depending on whether immunity is “deemed” capable of preventing parasite reproduction and consequent infection of other cells. In bacteria and archaea, immunity genes typically colocalize with PCD modules, such as toxins-antitoxins, suggestive of immunity-PCD coupling, likely mediated by shared proteins that sense damage and “predict” the outcome of infections. In type VI CRISPR-Cas systems, the same enzyme that inactivates the target RNA might execute cell suicide, in a case of ultimate integration of immunity and PCD.
MIT Department
Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201600186
