Effective clearance of an infection requires that the immune system rapidly detect and neutralize invading parasites, while strictly avoiding self-antigens that would result in autoimmunity.

CRISPR-mediated adaptive immune systems play a major role in regulating the dynamic equilibrium between bacterial populations and their viral parasites.

The goal of this project is to understand how the CRISPR-mediated immune system in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA14) selectively integrates foreign nucleic acids into the CRISPR loci and how this genetic record is used to regulate the expression of specific genes.