Authors: Baptiste Darracq, Eloi Littner, Manon Brunie, Julia Bos, Pierre Alexandre Kaminski, Florence Depardieu, Weronika Slesak, Kevin Debatisse, Marie Touchon, Aude Bernheim, David Bikard, Frédérique Le Roux, Didier Mazel, Eduardo P. C. Rocha, Céline Loot
Published: 2025-05-29
Source: Full article
Integrons are genetic systems that drive bacterial adaptation by acquiring, expressing, and shuffling gene cassettes. While mobile integrons are well known for spreading antibiotic resistance genes, the functions of the hundreds of cassettes carried by sedentary integrons remain largely unexplored. We show that many of these cassettes encode small variants of known antiphage systems that favor their inclusion in the integron. We also demonstrate that nearly 10% of the integron cassettes in the pandemic