To address drug-resistant tuberculosis, the leading single-pathogen infectious killer, drugs with novel modes of action (MoAs) are urgently needed. Phenotypic screening of chemical libraries can ident...

Antibiotic resistance is supercharging dangerous gut bacteria to withstand even hospital-grade disinfectants intended to kill them.

Many prokaryotes are diderms. They divide using an FtsZ division ring to simultaneously constrict physically coupled inner and outer membranes to form daughter cells with two membranes. Currently, onl...

Flagella are large transenvelope nanomachines but how they transit the peptidoglycan in gram-positive bacteria is poorly understood. A recent model...

A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

How did modernizing cheesemaking change the microbes inside the cheese? By sequencing preserved traditional Alpine cheese wheels spanning 142 years from a single Alpine dairy, Somerville et al. trace ...

Symbiotic relationships of microorganisms are predicted and cataloged with a machine learning tool.

We developed a broad-host-range dual base editor that transiently induces genome-wide hypermutation, accelerating adaptive laboratory evolution by up to four orders of magnitude. The platform rapidly...

Abstract. Bacteria produce the alarmone nucleotides ppGpp and pppGpp during stress to affect replication, transcription, and metabolism. ppGpp and pppGpp a

Abstract. Sparsomycin (SPA) is a broad-spectrum inhibitor of protein synthesis with activity across all three domains of life. Although SPA has long been k

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 25 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02486-1Phage Tn-seq uses Tn5 transposon mutagenesis with anti-CRISPR-based selection and deep sequencing as a method to generate unbiased, genome-wide mutations across diverse phages

Fascinated by evolution and driven by curiosity, Malik studies everything from viruses to Drosophila and, like his research subjects, is constantly reinventing himself.

npj Biofilms and Microbiomes - MeeY and YybP, two proteins regulated by manganese-sensing riboswitches, are required for Bacillus subtilis biofilm formation

SUMMARYRNA modifications in the tRNA, rRNA, and mRNA constitute a widespread layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation, commonly known as the epitranscriptome. In bacteria, tRNA and rRNA modificat...

Gloeotrichia echinulata is a type of cyanobacterium that draws scrutiny because it tends to bloom in clear lakes, forming thick mats of visible green or white puffballs in otherwise clean water. Becau...

A synthetic biology technology has been developed that converts easily degraded messenger RNA (mRNA) into a ring-shaped form inside microbial cells, increasing protein production.

Resource supply is generally considered a dominant driver of microbial diversity. Here, using a four-species bacterial consortium, we asked whether...

In vivo silencing of genes in E. coli strains using CRISPRi reveals specific genetic factors and metabolic adaptations that influence colonization in the mouse gut under variable physiological conditi...

Heritable microbes profoundly influence insect biology, yet the traits they confer often evolve rapidly and differ among closely related symbiont s...

Abstract. Experimental evolution provides a powerful framework for dissecting how ecological interactions shape adaptive trajectories. Here, we evolved Kle

Structural variants and so-called tandem repeats are individual differences in the human genome. They are increasingly linked to diseases, but analyzing and interpreting them poses challenges for…

Abstract. Experimental evolution provides a powerful framework for dissecting how ecological interactions shape adaptive trajectories. Here, we evolved Kle

Antimicrobial resistance is often inferred from resistance genes and susceptibility phenotypes measured under standardized conditions. We argue that for many resistance genes, resistance is better vie...

CRISPR-Cas provides RNA-mediated adaptive immunity, but how its first RNA-guided effector arose is unclear. In this study, we report the discovery of Viral Interference Programmable Repeat (VIPR) syst...

Resistance to β-lactam antibiotics in the human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae is mainly attributed to the acquisition of mutated versions of pbp2x , pbp2b and pbp1a , encoding functional penicilli...

Phosphorothioates, stereospecific modifications of the RNA phosphate backbone in anaerobic archaea, expand the epitranscriptome beyond nucleobases and ribose sugars. Installed by Esti enzymes at conse...

Resource supply is generally considered a dominant driver of microbial diversity. Here, using a four-species bacterial consortium, we asked whether...