bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.01.971358. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. pAgo-induced DNA interference protects bacteria from invader DNA Anton Kuzmenko1,2*, Anastasiya Oguienko1, Daria Esyunina1, Denis Yudin1, Mayya Petrova1, Alina Kudinova1, Olga Maslova1, Maria Ninova2, Sergei Ryazansky1, David Leach3, Alexei A. Aravin1,2*, Andrey Kulbachinskiy1* 1 Institute of Molecular Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 123182, Russia 2 Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 3 Institute of Cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3FF, UK * To whom correspondence should be addressed:
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.01.971358. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Members of the conserved Argonaute protein family use small RNA guides to find their mRNA targets to regulate gene expression and suppress mobile genetic elements in eukaryotes. Argonautes are also present in many bacterial and archaeal species 1-3. Unlike eukaryotic proteins, several studied prokaryotic Argonautes use small DNA guides to cleave DNA, a process dubbed DNA interference 4-8. However, the natural functions and targets of DNA interference are poorly understood and the mechanisms of DNA guide generation and target discrimination remain unknown.