Most naturally occurring bacteria are lysogens, encoding one or more temperate phages (prophages) integrated into their genome. As prophages are induced by the bacterial SOS response, DNA-damaging ant...

Antiphage defense systems protect bacteria from viral infection and have inspired important biotechnologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 while also revealing the evolutionary roots of eukaryotic innate immunit...

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) employ diverse and distinctive mechanisms of cDNA synthesis to protect bacteria against viral infection. However, much of DRT family diversity remains ...

In addition to messenger RNA (mRNA) that provide the code for proteins, there are other RNAs that exert their function just as RNA, usually referred to as non-coding […]

Antibiotic resistance is frequently observed shortly after the clinical introduction of an antibiotic. Whether and how frequently that resistance occurred before the introduction is harder to determin...

Although bacteriophage genomes are under strong selective pressure for high coding density, they are still frequently invaded by mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Group II introns are MGEs that reduce h...

Many flaviviruses generate specialized non-coding RNAs that resist degradation by host exonucleases, promoting viral infection. Here, the authors characterize an RNA element in Powassan virus, highlig...

Computational design of molecular recognition remains challenging despite advances in deep learning. The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been particularly difficult because it requ...

Conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution, from populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements in microbes. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-r...