How bacteria ward off viruses: New molecular machinery discovered

Researchers have provided the first blueprint of a bacterium's "molecular machinery," showing how bacterial immune systems fight off the viruses that infect them. By tracking down how bacterial defense systems work, the scientists can potentially fight infectious diseases and genetic disorders. The key is a repetitive piece of DNA in the bacterial genome called a CRISPR, for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.