Some Nerdy science person!!

Thank you for posting.

This research is fascinating and very well done; however, the popular science article in Science Alert that is referenced in the OP overstates some of the work. Yes, the phage encoded nuclear shell protein chimallen does appear to protect the phage DNA from CRISPR and not mentioned in the linked article, but in the Nature publication is the presence of pores that appear to allow phage mRNA to exit and be translated into phage protein by host ribosomes. Also the chimallen may be processed by a protease to enable phage capsids to dock on the shell surface for genome packaging. Further, this protein seems to be conserved in other jumbo phage. One question yet unanswered is how the phage DNA is protected after injection into the bacterial cytoplasm, but before the formation of the chimallen protein shell.

My criticism about overstatement comes from the mention of how this might be used to fight antibiotic resistance in bacteria. This might work, but bacteria have and will continue to rapidly evolve mechanisms that will allow them to be resistant to phage attack. The easiest one to evolve is the mutation of the phage receptor(s) on the host cell surface. There have been many studies that have demonstrated this. There is always a evolutionary war between host and parasite/virus/pathogen - one evolves a resistance and the other responds with a mutation that evades the resistance. This back and forth goes on as long as there are phage and bacterial hosts (or any predator-prey or host-pathogen).

I love microbiology! Which is why I continue to run a research lab, train graduate and undergraduate students, publish our results, and write more research grant proposals.

Finally, thank you to Judi Lynn for posting this and other articles.