The exchange of biological matter between bacterial cells drives adaptation and evolution. However, whether bacteria can exchange functional proteins remains unclear. In this work, we found that antib...

A secondary metabolite sensitizes competitor Bacillus subtilis to a wide panel of lytic phages by sequestering iron and preventing the activation of Spo0A.

CRISPR-associated transposons (CAST) use guide RNAs to direct their transposition and are being harnessed as tools for programmable genome engineering across diverse bacterial species. However, CAST s...

The airways of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) are often co-infected by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and a variety of other co-habiting microbes; the infections are polymicrobial. P. aeruginosa isolates fr...

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) accelerate evolution by rapidly diversifying variable proteins. The human gastrointestinal microbiota harbors the greatest density of DGRs known in nature, su...

A protein foundation model represents protein sequence, structure and function.

This work presents Spacedust, a tool for de novo identification of conserved gene clusters from metagenomic data.

Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

Viruses frequently induce the formation of specialized subcellular compartments to facilitate their replication and assembly. Here, we describe a “hos…

Plasmids exhibit a broad range of sizes and copies per cell, and these two parameters appear to be negatively correlated. Here, Ramiro-Martínez et al. analyse the copy number of thousands of diverse b...

Bacteria can respond to environmental changes by expressing small RNAs (sRNAs), which regulate mRNAs by complementary base-pairing. This regulatory mechanism allows bacteria to rapidly adapt their proteome. In recent years, sRNAs have gained attention as blueprints for synthetic regulators allowing control over user-defined targets. Multiple aspects need to be considered for efficient application of these versatile, on-demand, and easy-to-use tools. Advances in computational prediction and bioengineering concepts are the dawn of systematic synthetic sRNA biology. We provide an overview of sRNAs and alternative post-transcriptional regulators, highlight the requirements for successful regulation, and provide guidelines for design, construction, and sRNA application.