Plasmids drive bacterial adaptation, but how their diversity arises has remained unclear. Here, they show that in Staphylococcus aureus, mobile genetic elements repeatedly fuse and delete plasmids, re...

Transposon-insertion sequencing (Tn-seq) couples transposon mutagenesis with next-generation sequencing to identify the transposon insertion site for thousands of mutants in parallel. It is a powerful...

Bacteria have evolved numerous and diverse pathways to produce and secrete bacteriocins as weapons of bacterial warfare. These molecules are processed inside the cell and then transported across the bacterial membrane for secretion. We recently discovered the TMcins, a distinct class of bacteriocins found across gram-positive bacteria that contain a transmembrane helix and kill target bacteria by forming large pores. Using a Staphylococcus aureus strain that naturally produces TMcin, we show that TMcin production occurs in the cell membrane and reveal how bacteria process a membrane-spanning peptide in a lipid environment. This work expands our understanding of how bacteria produce antimicrobials and provides a model for discovering other membrane-localized natural products.

The bacterial cell cycle is an ensemble of integrated pathways that coordinates cell growth and division. Although these pathways contain a suite of promising antimicrobial targets, their functional o...

Free automated phage genome annotation -- pharokka, phold and phynteny in one pipeline.

While Staphylococcus aureus is predominantly an extracellular human commensal, it can also exhibit an intracellular lifestyle that enables its persistence within diverse host cell types, including mon...

Biophysics; Clinical microbiology; Microbiology; Molecular biology; Systems biology

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Author summary Enterococcus faecalis is a major opportunistic pathogen and a leading cause of several life-threatening hospital-associated infections. The ability of E. faecalis to cause disease is cl...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 01 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02333-3This Review summarizes recent advances in bacterial single-cell transcriptomics approaches, while also discussing technological and computational challenges remaining to be met and the need for standardization going forwards.

Nature Communications - The efficiency of horizontal gene transfer between different bacterial lineages is often unclear. Here, Figueroa et al. show that lateral transduction is the primary driver...

Author summary Bacteria must integrate feedback from multiple metabolic processes and environmental cues to efficiently allocate carbon to produce essential building blocks such as nucleotides, amino ...

Traditional vaccines target specific pathogens, limiting their scope against diverse respiratory threats. We describe an intranasal liposomal formulation combining toll-like receptor (TLR) 4 and 7/8 l...

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