The arms race between bacteria and their competitors has produced an astounding variety of conflict systems that are shared via horizontal gene transfer across bacterial populations. In this issue of the Journal of Bacteriology, Burroughs and Aravind investigate how these biological conflict systems have been mixed and matched into new configurations, often with novel protein domains (A. M. Burroughs and L. Aravind, J Bacteriol 202:e00365-20, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1128/JB.00365-20). The authors additionally characterize the evolutionary history of genes in eukaryotes that appear to have been acquired from these prokaryotic defense systems.

中文翻译：

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细菌冲突系统的语言学揭示了真核先天免疫的古老起源。

细菌与其竞争者之间的军备竞赛产生了各种惊人的冲突系统，这些冲突系统通过跨细菌种群的水平基因转移而共享。在本期《细菌学杂志》中，Burroughs和Aravind研究了如何将这些生物学冲突系统混合并匹配成新的结构，并通常将其与新的蛋白质结构域结合使用（AM Burroughs和L. Aravind，《细菌学杂志》 202：e00365-20，2020年， https://doi.org/10.1128/JB.00365-20）。作者还描述了似乎是从这些原核防御系统中获得的真核生物中基因进化史的特征。