Inside cells, DNA is intimately associated with proteins, forming chromatin. The protein constituents of chromatin vary across the tree of life: histones are the principal building blocks of chromatin...

Archaea and bacteria routinely live side by side in microbial communities and must interact at least on occasion. Whether such cross-Domain interactions are dominated by mutual disregard, co-operation...

Archaea and bacteria routinely live side by side in microbial communities and must interact at least on occasion. Whether such cross-Domain interactions are dominated by mutual disregard, co-operation...

antiSMASH is widely used for biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) detection and annotation, but its standard workflow is poorly suited to large metagenomic assemblies, where massive contig counts create severe runtime bottlenecks and complicate downstream result exploration. We present metaSMASH, a re-engineered fork of antiSMASH for metagenome-scale BGC analysis. metaSMASH preserves the original antiSMASH detection and annotation logic while introducing streaming, memory-bounded execution, record-level parallelisation, optional output filtering, and an interactive dashboard for large result sets. Across 25 benchmark metagenome datasets, metaSMASH reproduced identical BGC detection results while dramatically reducing computational cost. Relative to the default antiSMASH configuration, metaSMASH was a geometric-mean 38x faster. It also outperformed an ad hoc chunked antiSMASH workflow: in the default configuration it achieved a geometric-mean 2.9x speed-up and 1.7x lower peak memory, and with extended-analysis modules enabled it was 2.7x faster and used 3.1x less memory while completing all datasets, whereas the ad hoc workflow ran out of memory on the two largest assemblies. By substantially reducing the computational burden of large-scale metagenome analysis without sacrificing result equivalence, metaSMASH makes routine mining of assembled metagenomes more practical and provides a scalable foundation for natural product discovery from complex microbial communities. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. German Center for Infection Research, TTU Novel Antibiotics 09.716 Volkswagen Foundation, 0072511-00

The emergence of the eukaryotes coincided with the diversification of histone proteins and their post-translational modifications by enzymes that constitute the core of eukaryotic chromatin. Yet the e...

Archaea kill bacteria, at least on occasion. The molecular underpinnings of these lethal interactions are barely understood. Here, we describe cinquedea, an α/β hydrolase secreted by the halophilic ar...

Nature Methods - AF2BIND is a logistic regression model trained on AlphaFold2 pair features to predict small-molecule binding-site residues in proteins, without multiple sequence alignments,...

Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the fourth most commonly used plastic worldwide. Like all plastics, post-consumer PET is poorly managed and accumulates in the environment, posing significant ecolo...

How did life begin, and why does it matter? Scientists are tracing early microbial life—from LUCA to multicellularity—to unlock insights for biotech, climate science and even space exploration.

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...

Bona fide gene clusters for archaella are widespread across a bacterial phylum and encode functional motility machinery.

LexicMap uses a fixed set of probes to efficiently query gene sequences for fast and low-memory alignment.

Chromatin is the complex of DNA, RNA and protein that is found making up the chromosomes in eukaryotic cells. Chromatin is essential for proper genome function and is involved in chromosome segregati…

Bacterial defense systems present considerable barriers to both phage infection and plasmid transformation. These systems target mobile genetic elements, limiting the efficacy of bacteriophage-based t...

Paying tribute to Elio Schaechter, former TWiM host, blogger, and microbiologist extraordinaire, and review of the finding that Archaea produce peptidoglycan hydrolases that kill bacteria - a form of ...