Evolutionary conservation of sequence and secondary structures in CRISPR repeats.docVIP

Open Access Re rch 2007KuninetVoal.lumesea8, Issue 4, Article R61 Evolutionary conservation of sequence and secondary structures in CRISPR repeats Victor Kunin¤, Rotem Sorek¤ and Philip Hugenholtz Address: DOE Joint Genome Institute, 2800 Mitchell Drive, Walnut Creek, CA 94598, USA. ¤ These authors contributed equally to this work. Correspondence: Victor Kunin. Email: vkunin@ Published: 18 April 2007 Received: 9 October 2006 Revised: 24 January 2007 Accepted: 18 April 2007 Genome Biology 2007, 8:R61 (doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-4-r61) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2007/8/4/R61 ? 2007 Kunin et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Clustered1p9rpo5nmTohiucenrocaebregularlytdieasgleogcreoinsnoadtmiainterspacedorenys ashtnroduwcsttturhuraecshorttsturwerpai elhpalindromicaactnsoamflryopsmiesnodsfiavCteorepeatlusteredrrsyeboarsgeacnRegularlyhisamngsecsa.n/bInterspacedpegrouped bShortased oPalindromicn sequence siRepeatsmilarity,(CRISPRs)and that sosequencesme groupsfromhave Abstract Background: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) are a novel class of direct repeats, separated by unique spacer sequences of similar length, that are present in approximately 40% of bacterial and most archaeal genomes analyzed to date. More than 40 gene families, called CRISPR-associated sequences (CASs), appear in conjunction with these repeats and are thought to be involved in the propagation and functioning of CRISPRs. It has been recently shown that CRISPR provides acquired resistance against viruses in prokaryotes. Results: Here we analyze CRISPR repeats identified in 195 microbial genomes and show that they can be organized int