The exchange of biological matter between bacterial cells drives adaptation and evolution. However, whether bacteria can exchange functional proteins remains unclear. In this work, we found that antib...

A secondary metabolite sensitizes competitor Bacillus subtilis to a wide panel of lytic phages by sequestering iron and preventing the activation of Spo0A.

CRISPR-associated transposons (CAST) use guide RNAs to direct their transposition and are being harnessed as tools for programmable genome engineering across diverse bacterial species. However, CAST s...

The airways of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) are often co-infected by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and a variety of other co-habiting microbes; the infections are polymicrobial. P. aeruginosa isolates fr...

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) accelerate evolution by rapidly diversifying variable proteins. The human gastrointestinal microbiota harbors the greatest density of DGRs known in nature, su...

A protein foundation model represents protein sequence, structure and function.

This work presents Spacedust, a tool for de novo identification of conserved gene clusters from metagenomic data.

Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

Viruses frequently induce the formation of specialized subcellular compartments to facilitate their replication and assembly. Here, we describe a “hos…

Plasmids exhibit a broad range of sizes and copies per cell, and these two parameters appear to be negatively correlated. Here, Ramiro-Martínez et al. analyse the copy number of thousands of diverse b...

Bacteria can respond to environmental changes by expressing small RNAs (sRNAs), which regulate mRNAs by complementary base-pairing. This regulatory mechanism allows bacteria to rapidly adapt their proteome. In recent years, sRNAs have gained attention as blueprints for synthetic regulators allowing control over user-defined targets. Multiple aspects need to be considered for efficient application of these versatile, on-demand, and easy-to-use tools. Advances in computational prediction and bioengineering concepts are the dawn of systematic synthetic sRNA biology. We provide an overview of sRNAs and alternative post-transcriptional regulators, highlight the requirements for successful regulation, and provide guidelines for design, construction, and sRNA application.

This study reveals that an outer membrane protein from the predator Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus forms a pentameric assembly that traps a lipid monolayer within. This allows the discovery of two superfa...

Aurora, a new large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data, outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean wave dynamics, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather.

Prokaryotic defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) were recently identified with antiviral functions; however, their functional mechanisms remain largely unexplored. Here we show that DRT9 f...

Linking genotype to phenotype is a central goal in biology. In the microbiological field, transposon mutagenesis is a technique that has been widely used since the 1970’s to facilitate this connection...

The economic consequences of cuts to the National Science Foundation and restricting scientific inquiry on this scale could be far-reaching.

Integrons are genetic systems that drive bacterial adaptation by acquiring, expressing, and shuffling gene cassettes. While mobile integrons are well known for spreading antibiotic resistance genes, t...

Exposure of Pseudomonas putida KT2440 to toxic metals activates genes PP_1663, PP_5002, PP_5337, and the two-component system RoxSR, possibly linked to membrane integrity, FeS cluster maintenance, an...

Single-cell gene expression analysis reveals phenotypic heterogeneity to enable bacterial specialization over the course of plant colonization.

L’ETMM vise à diffuser les nouveaux concepts et méthodologies en microbiologie en présentant des recherches de pointe inédites. Dans ce but, l’ETMM réunit des

The design of enzymes with complex active sites that mediate multistep reactions remains an outstanding challenge. With serine hydrolases as a model system, we combined the generative capabilities of ...

Interactions between fungi and bacteria can both suppress and promote bacterial fitness. This study uncovers a widespread form of antagonism, in which fungi like Candida albicans sequester magnesium t...

Bacterial□fungal interactions have traditionally been attributed to secondary metabolites, but the role of the bacterial extracellular matrix (ECM) in shaping these relationships has remained unclear....

Abstract. σ54 serves as an unconventional sigma factor with a distinct mechanism of transcription initiation, which depends on the involvement of a transcr