Helen Branswell, STAT's infectious disease reporter who earned the respect of experts and public health officials with her accessible, prescient dispatches, has died at age 69.

Nature - Antiviral immunity via telomerase-like reverse transcription in bacteria

Peer Bork, one of the most influential computational biologists of his generation, died on 16 January 2026 from natural causes (EMBL 2026). He was 62 years

by Christoph — Still images do not tell whether cells rotate their flagella like a propeller or flap them like a whip. To find out, one has to film living cells...

The bacterial world is teeming with diversity, from cyanobacteria to episymbiotic Saccharibacteria to the well-studied Escherichia coli. However, even within a single species, organisms vary in their gene content and gene sequences, leading to significant functional differences across very closely related bacteria. For instance, two isolates of E. coli may share only 40% of the same gene content, allowing different strains to function as human pathogens, gut mutualists, or environmental specialists (1–4). Although this population-level diversity in bacteria has been long-recognized, recent studies have increasingly emphasized that a single person can harbor multiple genotypes of a species at the same time within a single body site. High within-host intra-species diversity can occur in the human microbiota, including in the gut, skin, oral cavity, and vagina. Furthermore, although acute infections are primarily monoclonal, chronic infections can often be polyclonal. Both in the microbiota and in chronic infections, this high intra-species diversity can occur when multiple strains colonize a site over time and when bacteria diversify through evolutionary processes.

Antibiotic resistance is an alarming threat to public health worldwide. Specifically, drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus remains a major contributor to global mortality. Therefore, in-depth understa...

Fast average nucleotide identity (ANI) calculator for bacterial genomes, MAGs, and contigs. Supports genome comparisons and large-scale database searches. - bluenote-1577/skani

Insects have evolved diverse strategies to protect their genome-reduced symbionts during vertical transmission. Here, authors show that tortoise beetles have co-opted a Yellow protein to form spheres ...

Microbiome Repo: every public human shotgun-metagenome study (registry) and a curated, evidence-linked catalog of human gut metagenomes of all ages with per-sample metadata.

Bacterial species, even the strains within a bacterial species, can display very different gene inventories (1, 2). Bacterial genomes are tightly packed with genes, and there is an almost uniform asso...

Abstract. Transcription–replication conflicts are a major source of genome instability, particularly at highly transcribed ribosomal RNA genes, where RNA p

A billionaire is pushing Proposition 38. It steers $4.2 billion to one institution—and California taxpayers get the bill for 20 years.

Along Asdard archaea and alphaproteobacteria, myxobacteria and planctomycetes turned out to contribute

Abstract. Bacteriophages are not only the most ubiquitous biological entity on earth, but they also display remarkable genetic diversity across and within

Harada et al. describe an archaeon, recovered from a single marine plankton cell, whose 238-kb genome is the smallest known for the domain. It has lost nearly all metabolism but keeps the machinery to...

Fever is a common adverse reaction to vaccination, contributing to vaccine hesitancy and reduced uptake. To understand variation in fever risk, we longitudinally profiled fecal microbiota, oral temper...

Most microbial species are represented by a single genome in public databases. The lack of genomes for these ‘singleton’ organisms limits our understanding of their pan-genome diversity and evolution. Although the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) contains millions of sequencing datasets that could be used to expand our understanding of many species, the extent to which under-represented microbial species are present at levels sufficient for genome recovery is unclear. Here, we show that the pre-computed taxonomic profiles generated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information SRA Taxonomy Analysis Tool (STAT) can be used to identify SRA datasets containing recoverable genomes for under-represented microbes. Across >28 million SRA datasets, tens of thousands of singleton archaeal and bacterial species were detected, often at abundances consistent with successful genome recovery. Applying targeted genome recovery to 804 singleton species, we recovered genomes representing new strains for 472 species. The success rate of genome recovery correlated with STAT-derived estimates of genome coverage, demonstrating that genome recovery from the SRA is both predictable and scalable. Using the single available genome of Clostridium tarantellae as a case study, SRA data mining recovered seven additional C. tarantellae genomes, correcting assembly gaps in the reference genome, expanding its pan-genome and increasing its known host range by seven additional fish species. These findings reveal that many microbial species currently represented by a single genome are in fact widely distributed across existing sequencing data and highlight a major opportunity to systematically expand strain-level genomic diversity and pan-genomic representation for under-sampled microbial species without additional sequencing.

Background Testing microbial interaction hypotheses, including metabolite cross-feeding, remains a major challenge in microbiome research. Phages have the potential to probe organism-organism interact...

“It’s a wholly unethical trial, and it shouldn’t be allowed,” says Dr. Paul Offit of Guinea-Bissau study

Anoxygenic phototrophic green sulfur bacteria (GSB; Chlorobiia) are important primary producers in anoxic and sulfidic environments, whose significance in aquatic ecosystems will expand with coastal deoxygenation. Here, we employed a uniquely comprehensive analytical approach to investigate the formation, maintenance, and collapse of a GSB bloom. We combined multi-omics—V4V5 and synthetic long read 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, metagenomics, and metaproteomics—with total and GSB-specific cell counts, biogeochemical measurements, and isotopic analysis. The GSB bloom exceeded 109 cells ml-1, among the highest environmental cell densities reported to date, with up to 96 % of the bloom consisting of a single strain-level Prosthecochloris lineage (GSB-TRL01). Extreme sulfide concentrations (> 17 mM) coincided with peaking cell density and a shift in isotopic composition. Bloom persistence is supported by tightly coupled sulfur cycling, high rates of nitrogen fixation, mechanisms to tolerate oxidative stress and maintain redox balance, and nutrient acquisition through outer membrane transport systems. A shift in sulfur oxidizing enzymes towards enzymes with higher sulfide affinity proceeded bloom demise. Prosthecochloris GSB-TRL01 differs from closely related lineages in several outer membrane transport systems, including porins to transport phosphate and tonB-dependent transporters. Collectively, these findings identify physiological and metabolic strategies that may enable near-clonal Prosthecochloris populations to attain extraordinary biomass while coupling the sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen cycles in coastal euxinic environments. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. U.S. National Science Foundation, https://ror.org/021nxhr62, 2205993, 2426305, BIO220128 Simons Foundation, 824763

Microbial species disappearing from industrialized populations have evolved with humans over millennia and migrated worldwide with them—this may have consequences for human health.

Natural transformation is a widespread mechanism driving genetic exchanges in bacteria. It proceeds from the capture of extracellular DNA released ...

Microbial diversity is organised into operationally defined species. However, it remains unclear whether these, or finer-scale groups represent biologically meaningful units in natural communities. He...

Clostridioides difficile is a leading cause of infectious diarrhea. The gut microbiome-derived short-chain fatty acid butyrate triggers C. difficile to release its major virulence factors, toxins TcdA...

The highly reduced genome of the wasp spider's bacterial symbiont suggests an endosymbiotic lifestyle characterized by metabolic dependencies.

Bacterial spores are among the most durable of cell forms, protected by robust envelopes of layered protein assemblies. Remarkably, these envelopes often share similar architectures across distantly r...

Density-dependent regulation of collective order through collision sensing and collision-induced reversals provides a navigational advantage to Pseudomonas aeruginosa during surface colonization and n...

The version of the central dogma of molecular biology as popularized by James Watson states that “DNA → RNA → protein” (1). This oversimplified framework has since been challenged by the discovery of ...