CRISPR-Cas provides RNA-mediated adaptive immunity, but how its first RNA-guided effector arose is unclear. In this study, we report the discovery of Viral Interference Programmable Repeat (VIPR) syst...

A functional screen reveals phage sponge proteins that bind Pycsar, Thoeris and CBASS signalling molecules to inhibit bacterial immunity.

A better understanding of battles between bacteria and viruses could inspire new medicines

Bacteriophages are the most abundant life form on earth and can be applied to eliminate or engineer bacteria. Here, authors demonstrate RNA barcoding as a high throughput tool to measure bacteriophage...

Been a real please to host Kerwyn Huang from Stanford University as a Fulbright Association scholar in Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Otago University of Otago. It has been a great few month...

This week I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at CRISPRDownunder #CDU2026 alongside Ekaterina Semenova in Melbourne. So much inspiring work happening in both the fundamental and applied are...

A great day on Monday visiting Monash University Biomedicine Dicovery Institute to give a seminar and talk with the fantastic researchers there. Francesca Short, Trevor Lithgow, Gavin Knott, Jeremy Ba...

Phages are important drivers of bacterial evolution with therapeutic potential as antimicrobials. However, gaps in our understanding of phages and our inability to rapidly engineer them with new genetic cargo hinders progress towards phage-based therapies. To address the lack of unbiased, genome-wide mutational tools for phages, we developed transposon mutagenesis employing CRISPR-anti-CRISPR (Acr)-based selection and deep-sequencing (Phage Tn-seq). Transposon mutagenesis was effective for phages with unmodified or hypermodified genomes and a jumbo phage that protects its DNA within a nucleus. Phage Tn-seq enabled phage gene essentiality assignment consistent with structural proteomics and core gene conservation. Insertion biases allowed prediction of transcriptional direction and early injected phage DNA regions. We exploited the method to rapidly deliver new cargo to phage genomes in just a few days and used an AI-designed Acr to expand the phage transposon toolbox. Phage Tn-seq is a versatile tool to advance our understanding and applications of phages. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Royal Society Te Apārangi, https://ror.org/04tajb587 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, https://ror.org/012kf4317 The L’Oréal Groupe Australia University of Otago, https://ror.org/01jmxt844

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

As a leading research institution for microbial biotechnology the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences - Biotechnology (IBG-1, https://www.fz-juelich.de/de/ibg/ibg-1 ) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich foc...

We seek a creative, collaborative, and visionary plant biologist to establish an internationally recognized research program at the forefront of plant-microbe interactions aimed at understanding how t...

Smith and Fineran describe how priming by type I CRISPR-Cas systems facilitates adaptation and spacer maintenance by a co-occurring type III system, which normally induces abortive infection. While ty...

In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, companion manuscripts from Margolis & Meeske and Smith & Fineran demonstrate that CRISPR-Cas systems have an unprecedented level of cooperative crosstalk between ...

OverviewIn 2009, the Institut Pasteur, the world leading biomedical research institute founded by Louis Pasteur in 1887, inaugurated the Pasteur Paris-University (PPU) international doctoral program i...

Prokaryotic genes are arranged in operons, with functionally related genes often located adjacent to one another (1). There are several ways in which the operonic organization of genes facilitates the...

Establishing antisense oligomers as versatile, non-genetic tools to silence phage mRNAs opens applications in basic research and biotechnology, as shown by identifying essential factors for propagatio...

Capsid-forming PICIs (cf-PICIs) produce their own capsids and exploit phage tails from unrelated species to transfer their DNA across bacterial hosts. This tail piracy enables broad dissemination and ...

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