Cultivation-dependent techniques, computational analyses and genome-scale metabolic models show widespread amino acid auxotrophies, suggesting that soil microorganisms exist within integrated ecologic...

Wastewater treatment relies on complex microbial communities, yet existing genome-resolved references for this essential engineered ecosystem remain dominated by short-read assemblies, limiting genome...

In a recent Cell paper, Maurais et al. show that genomic instability drives human cells to transfer fragmented chromosomes to neighbors via tunneling nanotubes (TNTs), with heritable functional consequences, raising fundamental questions about intercellular communication, genome surveillance, and cancer evolution.

Baertschi et al. demonstrate that microbiota transplantation functions as a selective ecological filter. Although donor species frequently appear, only specific lineages achieve stable strain integrat...

ASM Microbe showcases the best microbial sciences in the world and provides a one-of-a-kind forum to explore everything from basic microbiology to translation and application.

Systematic analysis of prokaryotic STAND NTPases — relatives of animal and plant immune receptors — uncovers diverse antiviral sensors that detect most of the core structural and replicative proteins of bacteriophages.

This record contains: (i) prokaryote genomes binned from seawater metagenomes collected from 48 sites on the Great Barrier Reef (ii) Crassvirales genomes identified in metagenome assemblies (iii) Mami...

The Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database compiles prokaryotic, viral and eukaryotic genomes from seawater collected from the Great Barrier Reef, providing a rich resource for the study of mar...

Oxygen is one of the most important environmental variables affecting microbial activity and composition, but is often difficult to measure in situ. We developed a tool, OxyMetaG, that leverages differences in bacterial gene content across known aerobic and anaerobic taxa to predict the oxygen level of a given sample directly from shotgun metagenomic reads. OxyMetaG works on samples with low sequencing depth and avoids computationally expensive genome assembly, which often captures only a fraction of the microbial community in a given environment. With OxyMetaG, bacteria can be used as bioindicators of oxygen availability over broader time scales than just a single measurement and provide crucial environmental context in cases where oxygen has not been or cannot be measured. OxyMetaG is publicly available and can be used to answer a wide variety of ecological questions in both environmental and host-associated systems.