Identification of immune systems with potential biotechnological application in bacteria of the genus Acinetobacter

Abstract

Bacteria and archaea are constantly exposed to the rampant invasion of phages or plasmids, generically known as mobile genetic elements (MGEs). In response, they have evolved diverse, complex defense systems that limit the intrusion of these foreign elements.Many new types of defense systems have recently been discovered by studying the genomic 'dark matter' of defense islands using a blame-by-association approach: uncharacterized genes that commonly reside alongside genes from known phage defense systems. they often encode new defense systems. As more genomic data is deposited in sequence databases, so are renewed efforts to comprehensively identify and characterize known defense systems.We propose to evaluate the heterogeneity of two recently developed tools: Prokaryotic Antiviral Defense LOCator (PADLOC) and DefenseFinder of in silico prediction of phage defense systems from NCBI genomes.From a Unix command line we used the rsync program and downloaded from RefSeq release 212, 8468 genomes of bacteria of the genus Acinetobacter. We make the predictions locally and compare them with each other.We believe that the integration of PADLOC and DefenseFinder is necessary since both tools are valuable for the identification and future characterization of defense systems against phages in bacteria of the genus Acinetobacter. No single best approach was identified. The definition of the “defense islands” on each genome will provide new regions to identify potentially new systems.