MPI-NAT Seminar: Non-Canonical Molecular Biology of Bacteriophages

Bacteriophages or simply phages have a high speed of evolution that allows them to develop different strategies to overcome bacterial defense mechanisms and use the host resources to produce new phage particles efficiently. This results in the appearance of phage enzymes with unique properties, which could be harnessed in biotechnologies. The main topic of the seminar will be the non-canonical transcription enzymes evolved in phages, such as an RNA polymerase recognising deoxyuridine in DNA, an unusually flat RNA polymerase, which is part of a phage tail, and others.