Alejandro González-Delgado

This study identifies Retron-Eco11 as a bacterial defense system that uses helicase proteins to trigger effector toxicity against phage infection.

The paper describes a non-canonical mechanism in Type VI retrons where reverse transcribed ssDNA derepresses translation of an antiviral toxin, providing phage defense without detectable msDNA.

This study demonstrates that retron-mediated recombineering can be applied across multiple bacterial species, achieving high editing efficiencies in several phyla.

The paper experimentally characterizes retrons to determine their RT-DNA sequences, production rates, and editing efficacy across bacterial, phage, and human genomes.