{"doi":"10.1093/nar/gkac343","title":"Control of bacterial immune signaling by a WYL domain transcription factor","abstract":"Bacteria use diverse immune systems to defend themselves from ubiquitous viruses termed bacteriophages (phages). Many anti-phage systems function by abortive infection to kill a phage-infected cell, raising the question of how they are regulated to avoid cell killing outside the context of infection. Here, we identify a transcription factor associated with the widespread CBASS bacterial immune system, that we term CapW. CapW forms a homodimer and binds a palindromic DNA sequence in the CBASS promoter region. Two crystal structures of CapW suggest that the protein switches from an unliganded, DNA binding-competent state to a ligand-bound state unable to bind DNA. We show that CapW strongly represses CBASS gene expression in uninfected cells, and that phage infection causes increased CBASS expression in a CapW-dependent manner. Unexpectedly, this CapW-dependent increase in CBASS expression is not required for robust anti-phage activity, suggesting that CapW may mediate CBASS activation and cell death in response to a signal other than phage infection. Our results parallel concurrent reports on the structure and activity of BrxR, a transcription factor associated with the BREX anti-phage system, suggesting that CapW and BrxR are members of a family of universal defense signaling proteins.","journal":"Nucleic Acids Research","year":2022,"id":237785,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":58,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9603,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":659948,"name":"Justin Nguyễn","orcid":"0000-0003-4102-1433","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":244706,"name":"Rebecca Lau","orcid":"0000-0002-4182-4394","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235298,"name":"Qiaozhen Ye","orcid":"0000-0002-3942-4121","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":847688,"name":"Yajie Gu","orcid":"0000-0002-1514-1477","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":106560,"name":"Kevin D. Corbett","orcid":"0000-0001-5854-2388","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":860676,"name":"Chelsea L. Blankenchip","orcid":"0000-0001-9882-4814","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":45,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:22:21.693802Z","pmid":"35536256","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}