Cultured phage collections provide essential access to viral biology, but they capture only a small and biased fraction of natural phage diversity. Key barriers to diverse phage isolation are likely t...

Für wen eignet sich eine Phagentherapie?

Only a fraction of bacterial genomes encode CRISPR-Cas systems but the selective causes of this variation are unexplained. How naturally virulent bacteriophages (phages) select for CRISPR immunity has...

PhD Project - (CODE M) Losing your head: how do bacterial viruses evolve into anti-competitor weapons? at The University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com

In this Review, Basler and colleagues examine the type VI secretion system (T6SS), focusing on the diversity of antibacterial T6SS effectors and the evolutionary forces that shape them. They explain h...

Mathematical modelling and experimental tests reveal principles that govern displacement of a resident strain by an invader in microbial communities.

Bacteria employ a range of competition systems that deliver toxins to inhibit competing strains. This study shows that these systems are particularly important for the ecology of virulent and antibiot...

Here the authors leverage a crossfeeding, engineered microbial community to demonstrate that strain abundance cycles are robust across environmental conditions. They pair this with a nonlinear dynamic model to elucidate population cycles.

Competition assays are a mainstay of modern microbiology, offering a simple and cost-effective means to quantify microbe–microbe interactions in vitro. Here, we demonstrate a key weakness of this meth...