Viruses interact with all domains of life and play fundamental roles in shaping biological systems from individual hosts to global ecosystems. Yet their identification remains difficult due to a lack ...

Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on Earth and play central roles in shaping microbiomes and influencing ecosystem functions. Yet, most viral genes remain uncharacterized, comprising w...

The climate crisis is one of the most urgent and complex challenges of our time. Although often overlooked in models and policy, microorganisms play a crit

Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, poor dispersers, and have evolved relatively recently.

Capsid-forming PICIs (cf-PICIs) produce their own capsids and exploit phage tails from unrelated species to transfer their DNA across bacterial hosts. This tail piracy enables broad dissemination and ...

In the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment, diploid yeast evolve to be tetraploid under selection for larger multicellular size, revealing how whole-genome duplication can arise due to its...

Diener et al. present a method that allows the estimation of dietary intake from human stool by detecting food-derived DNA in faecal metagenomes.

Reanalysis of 12,262 longitudinal infant gut microbiome samples using the Marker-MAGu pipeline revealed phage–bacteria dynamics over the first year of life.

Diverse and novel phages were recovered from anaerobic fatty acid–fed reactors. Phages linked to hosts in all three functional groups primarily consisted of generalists and temperate species, especia...

The Human Microbiome Compendium is a unified database of publicly available human gut microbiome 16S samples, built with the integrated data from hundreds of independent projects. The compendium is us...

Providing up-to-date phage genome databases, metrics and useful input files for a number of bioinformatic pipelines. - RyanCook94/inphared

Analysis of the blood DNA virome in patients with COVID-19 and autoimmune disease associates endogenous HHV-6 (eHHV-6) and high anellovirus load with increased disease risk, most notably for systemic ...

Metagenomic immunoglobulin sequencing (MIg-seq) uncovered patterns of IgA antibody binding of bacterial strains in the healthy human gut microbiome.

Immune systems must rapidly sense viral infections to initiate antiviral signaling and protect the host. Bacteria encode >100 distinct viral (phage) defense systems and each has evolved to sense cruci...

Bacteriophages are the most abundant and phylogenetically diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. In this study, w...

Author summary Being able to predict which viruses can infect which host species, and identifying the specific proteins that are involved in these interactions, are fundamental tasks in virology. Trad...

Nature Communications - All cells are encapsulated by a membrane of complex lipidic composition, and understanding the roles of different lipids in membrane function is experimentally challenging...

Intestinal regionalization is characterized by robust and resilient structural cell states and the intestine can adapt to environmental stress in a spatially controlled manner through crosstalk betwee...

A study of how the complex interaction between capsules and mobile genetic elements shapes gene flow in populations of Klebsiella pneumoniae reveals that capsule inactivation by phage pressure facilit...

Microbial communities are predominantly composed of species and intraspecies units, but the mechanisms behind the formation and persistence of these units are unclear. Here, the authors provide experi...

Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) therapies hold promise but suffer from variable transplantation efficiencies. Here, we examine microbiome spatiotemporal dynamics post-FMT with a super-colonizin...

The authors use time-resolved metabolomics and microfluidics to characterize enhanced heterotroph chemoattraction to metabolites released from cyanobacteria during early stages of phage infection.

The bacterial sequence data publicly available at the global DNA archives is a vast source of information on the evolution of bacteria and their mobile elements. However, most of it is either unassemb...

Avs proteins are bacterial anti-phage pattern recognition receptors evolutionarily related to eukaryotic NLRs. Here, Béchon et al show that a single bacterial Avs can recognize different phage protein...

Inferring the evolutionary history of prokaryotic pangenomes is complicated by the lack of a reference for neutral genetic variation. A study that uses pseudogenes as a neutral reference provides supp...

A toolkit for exploring prokaryotic methylation and base modifications in nanopore sequencing - GitHub - cultivarium/MicrobeMod: A toolkit for exploring prokaryotic methylation and base modificati...

Microbial transmission between hosts is known to have dramatic consequences for host-symbiont interactions. The question of whether this holds true for complex microbiomes remains largely unexplored. ...

In this Review, Jassey and Jackson explore the intricate relationship between viruses and the autophagic pathway, highlighting how viruses either exploit or manipulate the autophagy pathway to influen...