Zhang team discovers new CRISPR-Cas systems; plus E3 ligase targets and more

A group led by Feng Zhang at MIT and Eugene Koonin at NIH developed an algorithm, dubbed FLSHclust (locality-sensitive hashing–based clustering), to identify CRISPR-linked gene modules using all existing publicly available sequencing data. The team found 188 previously unreported CRISPR-associated systems and characterized four of them in the Science paper.

“The CRISPR-linked systems that we discovered represent an untapped trove of diverse biochemical activities linked to RNA-guided mechanisms, with great potential for development as biotechnologies,” said the authors...