Recent discoveries on bacterial immunity have revealed that several protein domains involved in anti-phage defense are conserved in eukaryotes, such as SIRim, TIR, PNP and gasdermin. Bacterial immune ...

EMBL Hamburg / CSSB The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is Europe’s flagship life sciences organization, with more than 110 independent research groups across Heidelberg, Hamburg, Grenobl...

Gallego-del-Sol et al. show that arbitrium-coding phages can sense non-cognate peptide signals from other phages to regulate lysis-lysogeny decisions. This crosstalk affects lysis-lysogeny outcomes of phage infections, mixed lysogenic communities, and polylysogens. Our results demonstrate that crosstalk is an important mechanism that drives phage interactions in microbial communities.

This study highlights that Schlafens are ancient, mechanistically conserved immune effectors that mediate antiviral immunity in organisms ranging from humans to bacteria.

Immune systems in animals, plants, and bacteria often rely on intracellular nucleotide signaling, which viruses can block by sequestering or degrading these signals. We identified structural and bioph...

The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Arg...

Extracellular contractile injection systems (eCISs) are bacteriophage tail-derived toxin delivery complexes that are present in many prokaryotes. Here, the authors present an analysis of eCIS tail fib...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 16 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-025-02239-6A library of 400 phage protein-coding genes is used to find a trove of antiphage systems, revealing systems that target tail fibre and major capsid proteins.

Bacteria must distinguish phage attack from normal homeostatic processes, yet the danger signals that trigger many defence systems remain unknown. Here, we show that a PUA-Calcineurin-CE-HAD module from Escherichia coli ECOR28 confers broad anti-phage protection by binding Dam-methylated deoxyadenosine monophosphate (m6-dAMP) generated during phage-induced chromosome degradation. Ligand binding converts a preassembled PUA-Calcineurin-CE hexamer loaded with six HAD phosphatases into a polymerising filament. The filament acts as a high-flux dNTP sink through a two-enzyme cascade: HAD first dephosphorylates dATP to dADP, and Calcineurin-CE then converts dADP to dAMP. dNTP collapse halts phage replication and enforces abortive infection. Multiple mobile-element DNA mimic proteins block filament assembly, revealing a direct phage counter-defence. More broadly, our findings extend a conserved, cross-kingdom paradigm of immune filament assembly to nucleotide-depletion antiviral defence and suggest modified-nucleotide sensing by related PUA-Calcineurin-CE modules as a widespread, underappreciated bacterial strategy. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, https://ror.org/01qqpzg67, Postdoctoral Bridging Fellowship F.L.N. is supported by a Wessex Health Partners (WHP) and National Institute for Health and Care Research Wessex Experimental Medicine Network (NIHR WEMN), Seed fund National Institutes of Health, GM145888, U24 GM129539) Maloris Foundation Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, P30-CA008748 Simons Foundation, SF349247 New York State Assembly

From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Abstract. Bacteriophages with RNA genomes are among the simplest biological entities on Earth. Since their discovery in the 1960s, they have been used as i

Bacteria defend themselves from viral predation using diverse immune systems, many of which sense and target foreign DNA for degradation. Defense-associated reverse transcriptase (DRT) systems provide...

InducTn-seq, a method for inducible mutagenesis followed by transposon insertion site sequencing, enables temporal control of transposition to bypass population bottlenecks and enable the quantificati...

Reverse transcriptases (RTs) have well-established roles in the replication and spread of retroviruses and retrotransposons. However, recent evidence suggests that RTs have been conscripted by cells f...