Microbial interventions offer sustainable opportunities to enhance soil health and ecosystem functioning, but they can also have unintended ecological consequences. This Comment explores their benefit...

Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that exclusively infect bacteria. They adsorb to their hosts through binding to cell receptors including flagella, pili, or lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Adsorption is ...

Bacteria deploy diverse immune systems to counter phage infection, yet how these systems sense invasion remains incompletely understood. This Review categorizes phage-derived triggers and outlines eme...

This platform identifies phages capable of infecting specific bacterial strains using genome sequences alone and could enable rational phage-therapy design and precision microbiome engineering.

Firmicutes are gram-positive bacteria with important roles in human health, disease, and industry. However, more than a quarter of genes in the mod...

Sept 19-25 – digging in

Bacteriophage tailspike proteins (TSPs) degrade bacterial capsules to enable infection, yet the molecular determinants of their function and host range remain unclear. We applied deep mutational scann...

Pork, beef and goat products are being recalled after a company allegedly used fake USDA inspection labels. Explore our interactive guide to see which products are affected and what to look for.

How did modernizing cheesemaking change the microbes inside the cheese? By sequencing preserved traditional Alpine cheese wheels spanning 142 years from a single Alpine dairy, Somerville et al. trace ...

Stories of science funding being cut, labs shutting down and scientists losing jobs have flooded the media under Trump's administration. These six graphics show how those changes have affected U.S. biomedical research.

Nature - Gene-targeting treatments could be used to treat other people with rare forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Soil bacteria colonize plants without causing visible disease, yet many suppress host growth. The prevalence and evolutionary reach of this cryptic inhibition are unknown, because phenotyping hundreds...

The correct subcellular localization of proteins is a critical step underlying myriad biological processes, but the cues that drive the specific lo...

Numerous bacteria naturally occur within spatially organised, multicellular communities called biofilms. Moreover, most bacterial infections proceed with biofilm formation, posing major challenges to ...

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 14 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02495-0To successfully translate microbiome knowledge into practical interventions for farmers, research must be designed with agriculture in mind and shift from retrospective observation to predictive actions.

Abstract. Methanogenic archaea research is challenged by limited strain resources, fragmented genomic data, inconsistent genome quality, substantial uncult

Abstract. Host-microbe relationships are studied across biological disciplines, with unique but overlapping conceptual frameworks arising from each of them

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 16 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02484-3An engineered non-pathogenic bacterium produces lytic phages and is protective in mouse models of Salmonella infection.

Plasmids drive bacterial adaptation, but how their diversity arises has remained unclear. Here, they show that in Staphylococcus aureus, mobile genetic elements repeatedly fuse and delete plasmids, re...

Author summary DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) pose a serious threat to genomic integrity, and their accurate repair is essential for cell survival. In bacteria, DSB repair largely depends on homologous recombination mediated by the RecA recombinase and supported by the SMC-like protein RecN. Although RecA and RecN are known to cooperate, how their interaction contributes to efficient repair has remained unclear. Here, we investigated the functional relationship between RecA and RecN by expressing proteins from Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Escherichia coli. We found that P. aeruginosa RecN (paRecN) exhibits limited activity in E. coli but regains full functionality when co-expressed with its cognate RecA, revealing strong species-specific compatibility. Furthermore, we identified gain-of-function paRecN mutants that restore compatibility with E. coli RecA while losing compatibility with their native partner. These findings demonstrate that the RecA–RecN interaction interface is shaped by species-specific coevolution. Our study provides mechanistic and evolutionary insights into how protein–protein interactions involved in genome maintenance are optimized within each species.