L-Threonine is an essential amino acid widely used in the feed, food, and pharmaceutical industries, and microbial fermentation is now the dominant route for its production. Further increases in produ...

Abstract. The type VI secretion system (T6SS) is a sophisticated machine that uses a contractile mechanism to deliver antibacterial toxins into neighboring

The resurgence of phage therapy has renewed interest in the interplay between phage resistance and antibiotic susceptibility and has stimulated research in the emergent field of non-canonical cellular...

Abstract. Sparsomycin (SPA) is a broad-spectrum inhibitor of protein synthesis with activity across all three domains of life. Although SPA has long been k

Millions of RNA sequences are readily available, but the structures that determine their function are not. Picornaviruses initiate translation through Internal Ribosome Entry Sites (IRESes), RNA eleme...

Fluorescent proteins are widely used as quantitative reporters of protein abundance in living cells. Here we show that this relationship can break down under translation inhibition: the cellular ribos...

In this Perspective, Levin and Wang give a brief history of bacterial growth rate and discuss how it is connected to nutrient availability and macromolecule synthesis, with a focus on (p)ppGpp as a ce...

Ribosomal RNAs contain numerous conserved nucleotide modifications, yet the functional importance of most of these modifications remains unclear. In Escherichia coli , deletion of individual 16S rRNA ...

Host-virus interactions remain poorly understood in archaea, whose information processing systems harbor a mosaic of bacterial and eukaryotic features. Here, we used complementary multiomics to invest...

Ribosomal RNA has a high density of epitranscriptomic modifications essential for faithful translation, and their levels vary across cell types and in disease. Typically, rRNA modifications are quanti...

A monthly journal publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed research on all topics related to RNA and its metabolism in all organisms

Sun, Wu et al. identify AvaS as a pyridoxal-phosphate-dependent RNA-modifying enzyme, producing the tRNA modification ava2C from k2C in bacteria and plants and linking RNA chemistry to translational r...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Transfer RNA (tRNA) modifications are essential for accurate translation and cellular adaptation to environmental changes. Although short-term modification dynamics are well documented, the impact of ...

When used as antibacterial agents, Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNAs) are generally designed to base-pair with complementary sequences of an essential mRNA and block translation initiation. Although bacteria...

JCVI-syn1.0 (Syn1.0) and JCVI-syn3A (Syn3A), genetically synthetic and genome-reduced versions of the naturally occurring bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, are landmark platforms for defining the gene se...

Different RNA modifications elicit different translation elongation rates for in vitro transcribed mRNAs that result in disparate translation outputs and fidelity, as shown here for N4-acetylcytidine ...

Therapeutic mRNAs rely heavily on the incorporation of the RNA modification N1- methylpseudouridine for their efficacy. Schiffers et al. present N4-acetylcytidine as a robust alternative that further ...

Issue #13

Integron insertion sites engineered into counterselection markers allow large-scale and high-throughput capture of integron-encoded genes from genetically tractable bacteria or DNA samples.

Bacterial growth laws quantitatively connect intracellular resource allocation to growth rate, enabling accurate predictions of physiology and antibiotic responses. Yet these laws have been rigorously...

Abstract. Bacterial tRNA (m1G37) methyltransferase (TrmD) is an essential enzyme required for accurate translation and represents an attractive antibacteri

A study by the Institut Pasteur and Pasteur Network Institutes, published in JAMA Network Open, reveals a rapid decline in the effectiveness of antibiotics against urinary tract infections in six Afri...

High sea surface temperatures are expected to weaken ocean carbon sinks and damage coral reefs.

Abstract. The ribosomal RNA sequence governs translation dynamics, yet understanding how changes beyond the conserved catalytic centers influence kinetics

Survival of enteric bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract depends on their ability to sense and respond to diverse forms of acid stress. This study identifies oxygen limitation, growth phase,…

Abstract. Most bacteria in natural environments experience prolonged nutrient limitation resembling the stationary phase and only intermittently encounter

Regulation of gene expression in the protozoan parasite Leishmania mexicana is known to be largely post-transcriptional, but the control of these processes is still not fully understood. This study…

Abstract. To successfully transfer, conjugative plasmids must overcome a recipient cell’s defence mechanisms. The leading region of many plasmids—the first

Abstract. Post-transcriptional modifications modulate transfer RNA (tRNA) structure, stability, and codon decoding properties, contributing to translation