Communications Biology - Two coinfecting archaeal viruses provide insights into virus-virus interactions

Viruses are ubiquitous mobile genetic elements that are obligate symbionts of cellular life forms and replicate exclusively within host cells. The ...

In this Review, Abergel et al. overview infection cycles across the Nucleocytoviricota phylum, highlighting shared mechanisms and lineage-specific features spanning viral entry, viral factory formation, genome replication, virion morphogenesis and egress, and discuss key unresolved questions in the field.

Researchers analyzed 369 giant virus genomes and identified widespread genomic islands, regions of rapid gene turnover that help these viruses adapt to hosts and even exchange genes with bacteria, rev...

(1) From July 2021 and May 2025 441 marine, freshwater, and soil samples were collected between longitudes 12.79° W to 23.68° E and latitudes 67.88° N to 83.90° N. (2) All samples were screened for v....

When do viruses become a threat? 🧬 Viruses are all around us, and most go unnoticed. With new viral generations emerging daily, just a few mutations under the right conditions can change everything. ...

AbstractMotivation. Assembly graphs are a fundamental data structure used by genome and metagenome assemblers to represent sequences and their overlap info

In this Essay, the evolution of life is construed as a ribosomal takeover, whereby the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensured the propagatio...

Nature Biotechnology - A long-read metagenome assembly method recovers circular and complete genomes better than existing tools.

Schultz et al. show that polar algae harbor extensive endogenous giant virus elements that are transcriptionally active, stress responsive, and integrated into host regulatory networks, highlighting v...

The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

Microflora Danica—an atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes—reveals that although human-disturbed habitats have high alpha diversity, species reoccur, revealing hidden homogeneity.

Abstract. Viruses are ubiquitous in all environments and impact host metabolism, evolution, and ecology, although our knowledge of their biodiversity is st

Borgs are large extrachromosomal elements of anaerobic methane-oxidizing archaea. Here, via in silico protein structure prediction of ~10,000 Borg proteins, the authors reveal that Borgs share numerou...

Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.

The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, generally declined after vaccines were introduced.

An exploration of previously undescribed variants from the long tail of the CRISPR–Cas distribution.

In this Journal Club, Luis Orellana recalls a 2005 publication by Konstantinidis and Tiedje that introduced average nucleotide identity as a sequence-based metric to determine the relatedness between ...