DNA glycosylases provide antiviral defence in prokaryotes.

Bacteria have adapted to phage predation by evolving a vast assortment of defence systems. Although anti-phage immunity genes can be identified using bioinformatic tools, the discovery of novel systems is restricted to the available prokaryotic sequence data. Here, to overcome this limitation, we infected Escherichia coli carrying a soil metagenomic DNA library with the lytic coliphage T4 to isolate clones carrying protective genes.

Where Are Czech Adolescents Active? The Patterns of Movement and Transport Behavior in Different Active Living Domains.

To understand the environmental determinants of physical activity (PA), precise spatial localization is crucial. This cross-sectional study focuses on the spatiotemporal distribution of PA among Czech adolescents (n = 171) using Global Positioning System loggers and accelerometers. The results showed that adolescents spent most of their time in sedentary behavior, with 57.

Present and future outlooks on environmental DNA-based methods for antibiotic discovery.

Novel antibiotics are in constant demand to combat a global increase in antibiotic-resistant infections. Bacterial natural products have been a long-standing source of antibiotic compounds, and metagenomic mining of environmental DNA (eDNA) has increasingly provided new antibiotic leads. The metagenomic small-molecule discovery pipeline can be divided into three main steps: surveying eDNA, retrieving a sequence of interest, and accessing the encoded natural product.

A genome-wide association analysis of loss of ambulation in dystrophinopathy patients suggests multiple candidate modifiers of disease severity.

The major determinant of disease severity in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) or milder Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD) is whether the dystrophin gene (DMD) mutation truncates the mRNA reading frame or allows expression of a partially functional protein. However, even in the complete absence of dystrophin, variability in disease severity is observed, and candidate gene studies have implicated several genes as modifiers. Here we present the largest genome-wide search to date for loci influencing severity in N = 419 DMD patients.

High-throughput retrieval of target sequences from complex clone libraries using CRISPRi.

The capture of metagenomic DNA in large clone libraries provides the opportunity to study microbial diversity that is inaccessible using culture-dependent methods. In this study, we harnessed nuclease-deficient Cas9 to establish a CRISPR counter-selection interruption circuit (CCIC) that can be used to retrieve target clones from complex libraries. Combining modern sequencing methods with CCIC cloning allows for rapid physical access to the genetic diversity present in natural ecosystems.