maintenance of CRISPR repeat elements
maintenance of crispr repeat elements
Any process involved in sustaining CRISPR repeat clusters, including capture of new spacer elements, expansion or contraction of clusters, propagation of the leader sequence and repeat clusters within a genome, transfer of repeat clusters and CRISPR-associated (cas) genes to new genomes, transcription of the CRISPR repeat arrays into RNA and processing, and interaction of CRISPR/cas loci with the host genome. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) elements are a family of sequence elements containing multiple direct repeats of 24-48 bp with weak dyad symmetry which are separated by regularly sized nonrepetitive spacer sequences.