The Science Daily published on November. 13, 2010 report about the secret of bacteria’s immune system that a team of researchers from the University of Laval unlocked (Science Daily Staff 3). The group was apparently led by Prof Sylvain Moineau of the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Bioinformatics. The publication of the research was on 4 November 2010.
Both articles underline the working principle of the CRISPR/Cas. The news article clearly states that it selects segments from the foreign DNA, and inserts them into locations in the bacterium’s genome. On the other hand, the research article, clearly defines the two stages involved. The first stage is the adaptation stage while the second is the interference stage. The researcher goes further explaining what happens in each stage. In the stage, the proto-spacers are to be acquired at the leader end of the CRISPR/Cas. The CRISPR/Cas system invades the DNA or RNA in the second stage (Moineau et al. 2).
The news article only informs the people about the research in brief. Clustered regularly interacted short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) is only stated in abbreviations, in the news article, it does not give more details about the CRISPR such as when was the discovery time and where. It also does not tell the readers about the unknown mechanisms of the spacer.
Both the news article and research show the procedures that the researchers took in the study. However, the research article gives a step by step sequence of the procedure, the requirements and the prevailing conditions for the processes, the persons who performed them and software used to analyze the strands. The research article has in depth detail on how the BIMs and the Streptococcus thermophilus strain grew in M17 suspended with LM17 at a temperature of 37 °C. Then the elimination of the bacteriophage-insensitive mutants took place. The incubation of the bacterial strain to obtain the optical density was then undertaken in 100 ml of LM17 at a temperature of 42 °C. The DNA was then extracted; the plasmid stability and plasmid- interfering mutant analyzed. The news article plainly shows an overview of these processes.
The research article shows the results of every procedure and the data collected for each where it was necessary to collect the data. The news article does not provide any data collected during any of the procedures. The data diagrams and graphs are also shown in the research article. These are the number of the proto-spacer corresponding to both the positive and negative strand, the CRISPR1/Cas system in Streptococcus thermophilus targeting incoming DNA and CRISPR1/Cas system targeting bacteriophage DNA. Even though, these details are crucial in this research, the news article shunned them.
The writer of the news article oversimplifies the research article leaving out some of the most important issues and inappropriate conclusions. The reporter also specifies that the DNA segments acts as an immune factor by cleaving only the incoming DNA while the researchers states that it cleaves either the DNA or RNA.
The viral and plasmid interference in vivo mechanism had not been determined during the research and is yet to be determined. This was overlooked by the news article. Both the news and research articles talk about the possible solution to preventing bacteria from developing resistance to antibiotics. This may be an important discovery in the field of medicine. The news article is not a credible summary of the research article. This is due to the inappropriate conclusions that have been made by the writer, even though the context might be the same.
References
Moineau, Sylvain, et al. “The CRISPR/Cas bacterial immune system cleaves bacteriophage and plasmid DNA.” Nature 468.7320 (2010): 67. Web.
Science Daily Staff. “Researchers Unlock a Secret of Bacteria’s Immune System.” Science Daily, 2010. Web.