Author summary Mycobacterium abscessus is an increasingly important bacterial pathogen that causes difficult-to-treat infections because it is naturally resistant to many antibiotics. A major contribu...

Clostridioides difficile is a major cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea. This pathogen produces toxins essential for disease and flagella that promote intestinal colonization. Flagella and toxins ...

Dr. Siân Owen, a Principal Investigator and Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, has been awarded a highly competitive five-year, $1.97 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) f...

H-NS is an abundant nucleoid-associated protein found in Enterobacterales species. Some conjugative plasmids encode H-NS homologues, which are thought to facilitate plasmid maintenance and reduce the ...

Ribosomes translate the genetic code in mRNA to synthesize proteins in all living organisms. Decoding of mRNA occurs in the small subunit of the ribosome and is mediated by tRNA anticodons. Regions ne...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02316-4An immunity-like system functions as a lysis control hub to promote gene transfer agent particle release from host bacterial cells, suggesting that bacterial immune systems may be co-opted to promote horizontal gene transfer.

Bacteria often survive viral attack and environmental stress by sharing genes that enhance their defenses. The cholera pathogen Vibrio cholerae carries a sedentary chromosomal integron (SCI), a genetic element containing hundreds of mostly promoterless ...

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Quorum sensing (QS) enables bacteria to coordinate gene expression in response to population density, with LuxR-type transcription factors playing a central role in this process for many Gram-negative...

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PcdA interacts with DivIVA and FtsZ, promoting Z-ring formation and division plane selection in Staphylococcus aureus, which increases virulence in mice and reduces sensitivity to cell-wall-targeting ...

Abstract. In prokaryotes, bidirectional promoters are pseudo-symmetrical DNA sequences that stimulate divergent transcription. Ubiquitous, and far more lik

Abstract. Conjugative plasmids are key drivers of bacterial adaptation, enabling the horizontal transfer of accessory genes within and across diverse micro

This special issue marking the University of Bath's 60th anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on nearly a decade of research into the evolution of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from members...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

DNA methylation is a widespread phenomenon in bacteria that can regulate gene expression, although the mechanisms underlying this epigenetic regulation are often poorly understood. In Clostridioides d...

Type IV secretion systems (T4SS) enable the spread of antibiotic resistance and other virulence factors. In Gram-positive bacteria, T4SSs have long been thought to lack VirB2-like proteins that form c...

When Streptococcus pneumoniae produces low amounts of the second messenger cyclic di-AMP (c-di-AMP), they do not survive in the presence of competence-stimulating peptide (CSP), which is used for tra...

Ribosomes translate the genetic code in mRNA to synthesize proteins in all living organisms. Decoding of mRNA occurs in the small subunit of the ribosome and is mediated by tRNA anticodons. Regions ne...

Using RIL-seq, Silverman et al. map the RNA interactome of E. coli during phage lambda infection and uncover a conserved phage-encoded sRNA that activates host replication machinery. Their findings re...

Abstract. Most bacterial small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) modulate gene expression by forming complementary base pairs with target messenger RNAs (mRNAs), dep

Bacteria control individualistic and group behaviors using a form of cell-cell communication called quorum sensing. Quorum sensing relies on the production of chemical signals called autoinducers and ...

Author summary Quorum sensing, a form of bacterial cell-cell communication, regulates diverse developmental behaviors. This study investigates CqsR, a transmembrane receptor in Vibrio cholerae, the ga...

From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

We discover and study reverse transcriptases