Mounting global responses to dynamic environmental conditions is a crucial function that bacterial cells must perform. Global regulatory networks are most often studied in individual species, however,...

Mounting global responses to dynamic environmental conditions is a crucial function that bacterial cells must perform. Global regulatory networks are most often studied in individual species, however,...

Cultivation-dependent techniques, computational analyses and genome-scale metabolic models show widespread amino acid auxotrophies, suggesting that soil microorganisms exist within integrated ecologic...

Microbial communities play vital roles in diverse ecosystems and are key drivers of numerous industrial or health-related applications. In many cases,…

Abstract. Many cyanobacteria are capable of flocculation: the formation of floating linked assemblages of many thousands of cells. Flocculation is a highly

Morphological evolution can be explosive, producing visually spectacular adaptive radiations like Caribbean anoles, Malagasy vangas, and African Ri...

Abstract. Low-copy-number plasmids often rely on dedicated maintenance mechanisms, such as partitioning systems, to ensure stable inheritance across genera

Abstract. Low-copy-number plasmids often rely on dedicated maintenance mechanisms, such as partitioning systems, to ensure stable inheritance across genera

A single bacteriophage can dominate microbial communities yet only evolves when migration changes its ecological context.

Applications are invited for a Research Assistant position in the group of Dr Sarah Robinson at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University. The successful applicant will be part of a group that inv...

Abstract. Point mutations of a genotype can leave the phenotype unchanged, or change it, in some cases radically. The extent of this phenotypic change can

Bacterial biofilms dominate microbial life; however, their evolutionary genetics remain incompletely understood. Extensive replication of biofilm selection experiments by secondary school students can...

AbstractProkaryotes form multicellular structures under both natural and experimental conditions, based on developmental programs that sometimes echo those known from eukaryotes. Recent research has i...

Molecular microbiology has traditionally focused on exponential growth in model organisms as the preferred context in which to study bacterial physiology, especially the regulation of new protein synt...

How do giant mobile elements called ‘Starships’ reshape fungal plant pathogens? Help us computationally model their spread and impact in nature and agriculture!

Spatial structure naturally emerges in microbial communities, shaping growth, interactions, and evolution, and revealing how microscale processes scale up

Led by Edoardo Gianni, Philipp Holliger’s group in the LMB’s PNAC Division have identified a small self-replicating catalytic RNA (ribozyme), providing new ...

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 ...

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 ...

Spatial structure naturally emerges in microbial communities, shaping growth, interactions, and evolution, and revealing how microscale processes scale up

Population bottlenecks shape the evolution of cooperative traits in Myxococcus xanthus through life cycle trade-offs. This study shows that stringent bottlenecks favor growth and sporulation, while re...

Polymicrobial infections are small communities of multiple interacting bacterial species. Interactions among constituent species may modify the growth of community members in the presence of antibioti...

The evolution of reproductive specialization represents a fundamental innovation in multicellular life, yet the conditions favoring its evolution remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a populatio...

Romeijn et al. reveal that horizontal transposon transfer is widespread in fungi, contributing up to 70% of transposon content in some taxa. The authors uncover thousands of events across diverse line...

Mutational robustness, the ensemble of mechanisms that allow organisms to maintain a stable phenotype despite genetic mutations, affects adaptive evol…

The bacterial and archaeal domains each possess a major clade that appears to be predominantly host-associated (1–3). These two lineages, Patescibacteriota and DPANN archaea (named for the Diapherotri...