Proceeding talk – Theme: Genome.
Abstract
CRISPR-Cas allows more specific and efficient gene editing than all previous genetic engineering systems. These exciting discoveries stem from the finding of the CRISPR system being an adaptive immune system that protects the prokaryotes against exogenous genetic elements. Despite the exciting discoveries, almost all knowledge about CRISPRs is based on microorganisms that can be isolated, cultured, and sequenced in labs. However, about 95% of bacterial species cannot be cultured in labs. The fast accumulation of metagenomic data provides a unique opportunity for CRISPR annotation in uncultivable microbial species. However, the large amount of data and heterogeneous coverage pose challenges for CRISPR annotation in metagenomic data. In this work, we developed a CRISPR finding tool for metagenomic data without relying on generic assembly, which is error-prone and computationally expensive for complex data. We tested it on both mock and real metagenomic data and benchmarked the performance with state-of-the-art tools.
Authors
Jikai Lei, Michigan State University, United States
Yanni Sun, Michigan State University, United States