CRISPRcompar -- a website to compare clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats
What you can do:
Automatically recovers from CRISPRdb all members of a genus containing a CRISPR and compares them.
Highlights:
- Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) elements are a particular family of tandem repeats present in prokaryotic genomes, in almost all archaea and in about half of bacteria, and which participate in a mechanism of acquired resistance against phages.
- They consist in a succession of direct repeats (DR) of 24-47 bp separated by similar sized unique sequences (spacers).
- In the large majority of cases, the direct repeats are highly conserved, while the number and nature of the spacers are often quite diverse, even among strains of a same species.
- Furthermore, the acquisition of new units (DR + spacer) was shown to happen almost exclusively on one side of the locus.
- Therefore, the CRISPR presents an interesting genetic marker for comparative and evolutionary analysis of closely related bacterial strains.
- CRISPRcompar is a web service created to assist biologists in the CRISPR typing process.
- Two tools facilitates the in silico investigation: CRISPRcomparison and CRISPRtionary.
Keywords:
- CRISPR
- clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat
- tandem repeats
- prokaryotes
- prokaryotic genomes
- bacteria
Literature & Tutorials:
This record last updated: 07-22-2008