A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

Scientific Reports - Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments by Bronze Age newcomers in Southwestern Britain

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 24 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02457-6Cultivation-dependent techniques, computational analyses and genome-scale metabolic models show widespread amino acid auxotrophies, suggesting that soil microorganisms exist within integrated ecological metabolic networks.

Microbiomes and their host environments form complex, interconnected ecosystems. The microbial species within a microbiome, on the one hand, compete for resources, while on the other hand, they exc...

Bacteria regulate homeostatic growth by adjusting proteome composition. In Escherichia coli, this coordination is mediated by guanosine tetraphosphate and pentaphosphate, collectively termed (p)ppGpp,...

The authors introduce a portable, automated single-command Nextflow pipeline for large scale analysis of metagenomic short-read sequencing data. It makes large metagenome projects more accessible to i...

Genome-wide selective sweeps commonly occur in the human gut microbiome and can spread across the world within decades to produce epidemic-like population structures.

"Blue zones" as a concept have strayed far and wide from their humble roots, write Shelley Wood and Eric Topol.

Gene expression is a fundamentally stochastic process, with randomness in transcription and translation leading to cell-to-cell variations in mRNA and protein levels. This variation appears in organis...

Biotic interactions modulate protein abundance, reducing functional redundancy and increasing productivity in complex bacterial communities.

Biotic interactions modulate protein abundance, reducing functional redundancy and increasing productivity in complex bacterial communities.

BackgroundThe microbiome-gut-brain axis is a mediator of stress-related disorders. The number of preclinical studies exploring the potential causal mechanism...

Microbiome analysis suggests that gut microbial changes in Parkinson’s disease evolve progressively from healthy individuals to genetically at-risk individuals to clinically affected patients, with th...

Here, the authors report metabolic activation as a potential antimicrobial strategy against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. They show that supra-physiological activation of L-histidine biosynthesis r...

Scientific Reports - Dietary patterns influence the in silico GABA production capacity of Bifidobacterium adolescentis HD17T2H and other human gut bacteria

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a neurotransmitter that inhibits neuronal excitability and also affects mucosal function and gut motility. Importantly, while the gut microbiome is a known source of ...

Using individual-level data from the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register and fecal metagenomes of 14,979 individuals in Sweden, the authors examined the association between oral antibiotic use over 8 yea...

This cohort study examines associations of baseline plasma phosphorylated tau 217 with incident mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia and whether associations vary by age, race, APOE ε4 carrier ...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 06 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02286-7Bulk polyadenylation improves the capture of microbial RNA, enabling host–microorganism interactions to be visualized at a high resolution when combined with commercially available spatial transcriptomics platforms.

A structural catalogue of the Asgard archaeal pangenome reveals hundreds of eukaryotic-like proteins that suggest a higher degree of cellular complexity in the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes.

Prebiotic and probiotic interventions can induce therapeutically relevant shifts in the human microbiome, but their effects are variable across individuals. This study shows that metabolic models can ...

Silva et al. perform a global analysis of over 11,000 gut microbiomes and reveal that uncultured bacteria are key markers of gut health. The uncultured genus CAG-170 is strongly linked to low gut dysb...

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 ...

The 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 Arg...

To comprehensively explore the biodiversity within a microbial species, the reconstruction of a substantial number of genomes is essential. In this study, we successfully uncovered the genetic diversi...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 05 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02259-wA covariate-aware analysis reveals that microbiome changes in the gut of patients with chronic kidney disease are better explained by intestinal transit time than by kidney function.