Israela Turgeman-Grott's research while affiliated with Tel Aviv University and other places

... In H. mediterranei, the three lanM genes were found in the chromosome (medM1) and the pHM300 megaplasmid (medM2 and medM3; Figure 1a). The possible relation of lanthipeptide production and the H. mediterranei antihaloarchaea activity was investigated by testing medM knockout mutants and it was concluded that they are not drivers of such inhibitory ability [5]. However, at the time, it was not possible to confirm that they were not haloarcheocins since it is unknown if medM BGCs are cryptic. ...

... Given that such flap structures are also formed during MMEJ and our observations that Cas3 is involved in the MMEJ process it is likely that both Cas1 and Cas3 can independently be found at repair sites. This could help direct spacer acquisition to elements already cut by other defensive nucleases such as restriction enzymes, but also cause acquisition of self-targeting "spacers" (Stachler et al. 2017(Stachler et al. , 2020). An additional advantage may be that by restraining HR, Cas3 will reduce the chances of foreign DNA elements, such as plasmids [which the H. volcanii system successfully targets and destroys (Fischer et al., 2012)] recombining with the host chromosome and integrated into it via shared insertion sequences or other repetitive sequences present in both the DNA of both the invader and the host. ...

... Creation of the stable hybrids suggests a low barrier for DNA transfer between haloarchaea. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) spacers matching chromosomal genes were later shown to be acquired during interspecies mating (143). ...

... It is tempting to speculate that these Ig-like domains may have facilitated the evolution of more complex surface recognition modules (46), such as the eukaryotic immune system. Indeed, it is known that glycosylation patterns on archaeal SLPs help organisms recognize 'self' from 'non-self' (47). Primordial S-layers built of such Ig domaincontaining SLPs may have played important roles in cellular recognition, which in turn could have supported the evolution of the modern eukaryotic cell, as suggested previously (46). . ...

... Because many GO categories were tested, we determined the probability of an enrichment by permuting gene category assignments, as described previously (Bullard et al. 2010;Fraser et al. 2011;Artieri et al. 2017). Gene assignments were shuffled and the test was repeated 10,000 times. ...

... Other potential biological explanations may be homologous recombination (driven by the repeats) or a mechanism where the spacers are shuffled to increase expression as spacers are more expressed at the leader end of the CRISPR array. Self-targeting immune memories of CRISPR-Cas have previously been demonstrated [60][61][62], but does not seem to explain our observation of spacers matching the CRISPR array of the host, since no chromosomal genes were targeted. Using a plasmid system in which we cloned two spacers (S2 and S1) originating from the native CRISPR array of E. lenta DSM 15644, we showed clear interference activity of the type I-C CRISPR-Cas system, including the necessity of the PAM 5ʹ-GGG and 5ʹ-TTC (Fig. 5). ...

... Importantly, inteins do not have their own mechanism to jump from one organism to another; rather, they rely on the flow of genetic information that occurs by other mechanisms. When two homologous genes are present in a single cell with one being an inteinfree copy and the other being an intein-containing copy, the translated intein facilitates the invasion of the intein-free allele with high efficiency [7,8]. Inteins invading the same site are known as intein alleles. ...