The Faculty of Medicine of the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburgand theHelmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI, Würzburg)jointly open a call for

Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 05 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41579-026-01284-0The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Argonautes and antiviral STAND NTPases, became central to eukaryotic innate immunity. In this Comment, we hypothesize that the cause of this paradox is the drastic reduction of horizontal gene transfer rate in eukaryotes.

Team from Würzburg, Braunschweig, and the US identifies Cas12a3 nuclease showing precise activity | Study just published in Nature

Cas12a3 nucleases constitute a distinct clade of type V CRISPR–Cas bacterial immune systems that preferentially cleave the 3′ tails of tRNAs after recognition of target RNA to induce growth arres...

Fragmented and primer Ligated DsRNA Sequencing (FLDS) was used to reconstruct five complete, bisegmented RNA genomes of paraxenoviruses, a group of viruses that was previously identified in the ocean ...

For decades, if not more, English speakers the world over referred to Ukraine’s capital as Kiev, pronouncing it kee-yev. Few people knew they were using the Russian name for the city. The city is pro...

Caspase family proteases and Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR)-domain proteins have central roles in innate immunity and regulated cell death in humans. We describe a bacterial immune system comprisin...

The evolutionary arms race between bacteriophages and their bacterial hosts has driven the evolution of sophisticated adaptive immune systems, such as CRISPR-Cas, as a crucial defense mechanism. While...

RNA modifications are conserved chemical features found in all domains of life and across diverse RNA biotypes, shaping gene expression profiles and e…

Prokaryotes sense viral and plasmid nucleic acids to start defense pathways against these invaders. This review examines the different mechanisms of DNA and RNA recognition and how these distinguish s...