AI predictions could help with pandemic preparedness, but they will need experimental confirmation.

By Dr. Douglas R. Waverly, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, Yale University

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

A genomic screen reveals homologues of ESCRT components in mirusviruses that infect unicellular aquatic eukaryotes.

This curated genome-resolved, metagenomic resource expands the known diversity of Nucleocytoviricota and Mirusviricota lineages.

Diverse E. coli phage genomes have hypermutable DNA regions that promote reversible frameshift mutations through DNA polymerase slippage, generating population heterogeneity that enables host exploitation.

cGAS-like receptors (cGLRs) are an important family of nucleic acid-sensing pattern recognition receptors in innate immunity, which produce cyclic dinucleotides (CDNs) to activate STING signaling and ...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 27 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02312-8A large-scale, comparative cell biology and biochemical screen defines the molecular features controlling antiphage defence systems that encode nuclease effectors and accessory NTPase proteins.

Phages employ diverse counter-defense strategies to overcome bacterial immune systems. Here, the authors reveal that the phage homing nuclease SegB facilitates immune evasion by promoting the segmenta...

Tak et al. discover that bacteria use 2′,3′-cGAMP, the same signaling molecule employed by mammalian cGAS-STING, for phage defense. In response to phage, 2′,3′-cGAMP activates filament formation of Ca...

Hepatitis D-like satellite viruses, known as deltaviruses, have been recently discovered in a wide range of animals. These viruses are thought to expr…

Immune systems in animals, plants, and bacteria often rely on intracellular nucleotide signaling, which viruses can block by sequestering or degrading these signals. We identified structural and bioph...

Klima et al. report the crystal structure of DhhP, a cyclic di-AMP phosphodiesterase of Borrelia. The structure reveals atomic details of the heterobimetallic active site and the overall asymmetry of ...

Michelson Medical Research Foundation (MMRF) is proud to announce the eighth cohort of recipients of its 2026 Michelson Prizes: Next Generation Grants , naming five early-career scientists whos...

Nature - An outbreak of MPXV in sooty mangabeys in Côte d’Ivoire was linked to MPXV-infected fire-footed rope squirrels, providing direct evidence of interspecies transmission and...

Nature Reviews Immunology, Published online: 05 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41577-026-01276-4Ruslan Medzhitov shares his thoughts on the balance between generating data and developing theories in immunology, with a focus on exploring the rules that govern complex systems.

Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 05 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41579-026-01284-0The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Argonautes and antiviral STAND NTPases, became central to eukaryotic innate immunity. In this Comment, we hypothesize that the cause of this paradox is the drastic reduction of horizontal gene transfer rate in eukaryotes.