Bacteria have immune systems? Even adaptive immune systems? And autoimmunity? Well... sort of.
In this episode Kate and Kevin discuss a new paper showing that anti-phage defenses of bacteria can provide really broad protection if they just get expressed at a higher level. So why don’t they? Trade-offs of course - always with the evolutionary trade-offs.
Links
The paper: Expression level of anti-phage defence systems controls a trade-off between protection range and autoimmunity
Portal protein review in Annual Reviews Virology
