On October 30, 2024, professor Yue Feng's research group of Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT) and Joseph Bondy-Denomy 's research group of the University of California, San Francisco, USA, collaborated again and published a research paper entitled， “Single phage proteins sequester signals from TIR and cGAS-like enzymes” online in Nature.
This paper and the series of work on Acb2 by Yue Feng's group confirmed that the only three known sponge proteins, Acb2, Tad1, and Tad2, are "super sponges" with multiple binding pockets to isolate signaling molecules. This finding suggests that anti-defense proteins with multiple signaling molecule binding pockets may be widespread, thus establishing a new paradigm for phage anti-defense "sponge protein" research.
Original link:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08122-4