Nucleoid-associated proteins sense phage-induced genome damage to elicit abortive infection https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.06.716658v1
Peter DeWeirdt
@pdeweirdt.bsky.social
PhD student @mit studying anti-phage defense systems using machine learning
Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
DefensePredictor: A machine learning model to discover prokaryotic immune systems
Antiphage defense systems protect bacteria from viral infection and have inspired important biotechnologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 while also revealing the evolutionary roots of eukaryotic innate immunit...
science.org
Peter DeWeirdt@pdeweirdt.bsky.social · 2y agoExcited to share our work using machine learning to predict anti-phage defense systems! 1/n
My group at MIT is seeking a research scientist with a strong *experimental* background to lead and help shape the lab’s experimental infrastructure, supporting efforts to advance AI-driven enzyme discovery and characterization. See the full JD here: acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:...
Adobe Acrobat
acrobat.adobe.com
Nature research paper: A membrane-bound nuclease directly cleaves phage DNA during genome injection go.nature.com/3P2jKFh
A membrane-bound nuclease directly cleaves phage DNA during genome injection - Nature
A widespread bacterial defence system called SNIPE is shown to localize to the cell membrane, where it identifies and cleaves the DNA of infecting phage as it is injected into the bacterial cell.
go.nature.com
👋 Hi antiphage defense community, we are soon releasing an update of DefenseFinder. We are doing our best to include all the great discoveries from the community, but with so much going on we might miss things. Please answer wt preprints/papers with new systems or mail/git them to us. 🙏