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.

This study reveals that an outer membrane protein from the predator Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus forms a pentameric assembly that traps a lipid monolayer within. This allows the discovery of two superfa...

Aurora, a new large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data, outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean wave dynamics, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather.

Prokaryotic defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) were recently identified with antiviral functions; however, their functional mechanisms remain largely unexplored. Here we show that DRT9 f...

Linking genotype to phenotype is a central goal in biology. In the microbiological field, transposon mutagenesis is a technique that has been widely used since the 1970’s to facilitate this connection...