TY - JOUR T1 - Inhibition of NHEJ repair by type II-A CRISPR-Cas systems JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/170647 SP - 170647 AU - Aude Bernheim AU - Alicia Calvo Villamanan AU - Clovis Basier AU - Eduardo PC Rocha AU - Marie Touchon AU - David Bikard Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/01/170647.abstract N2 - CRISPR-Cas systems introduce double strand breaks into DNA of invading genetic material and use DNA fragments to acquire novel spacers during adaptation. Double strand breaks are the substrate of several bacterial DNA repair pathways, paving the way for interactions between them and CRISPR-Cas systems. Here, we hypothesized that non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) interferes with type II CRISPR-Cas systems. We tested this idea by studying the patterns of co-occurrence of the two systems in bacterial genomes. We found that NHEJ and type II-A CRISPR-Cas systems only co-occur once among 5563 fully sequenced prokaryotic genomes. We investigated experimentally the possible molecular interactions causing this negative association using the NHEJ pathway from Bacillus subtilis and the type II-A CRISPR-Cas systems from Streptococcus thermophilus and Streptococcus pyogenes. Our results suggest that the NHEJ system has no effect on type II-A CRISPR-Cas interference and adaptation. On the other hand, we provide evidence for the inhibition of NHEJ repair by the Csn2 protein from type II-A CRISPR-Cas system. Our findings give insights on the complex interactions between CRISPRCas systems and repair mechanisms in bacteria and contribute to explain the scattered distribution of CRISPR-Cas systems in bacterial genomes. ER -