Bacterial ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters can be utilized and engineered to transport non-canonical amino acids into Escherichia coli for highly efficient synthesis of proteins with novel func...

Phages are typically viewed as very rapidly evolving biological entities. Little is known, however, about whether and how phages can establish long-term genetic stability. We addressed this eco-evolut...

Peptidoglycan (PG) is a crucial biopolymer in the bacterial cell wall that has been the subject of intense study since it was first isolated in the early 1950s (1, 2). Over the last 70 years, extensive research has expanded our understanding of the structure and function of this microbial biopolymer. Recent advances in mass spectrometry and bioinformatics have revolutionized PG analysis, enabling a comprehensive detection of individual components and their global composition within bacterial cells. Like genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, peptidoglycomics is the non-targeted, non-biased detection of all elements that comprise the overall PG structure. Peptidoglycomic analyses can identify and monitor hundreds of potential compositional changes that occur within the PG structure of a cell. By comparison, traditional methods of analyzing PG composition only distinguish a relatively limited number of PG components. Therefore, peptidoglycomic approaches produce a detailed global overview of the PG structural elements and give unprecedented insight into the physiological function of this biopolymer within the bacterial cell.

Establishing antisense oligomers as versatile, non-genetic tools to silence phage mRNAs opens applications in basic research and biotechnology, as shown by identifying essential factors for propagatio...

This structure of an archaeal tailed virus (arTV) provides detailed insights into arTV assembly and infection mechanisms.

The primatologist challenged what it meant to be a scientist.

Cells must coordinate DNA segregation with cytokinesis to ensure that each daughter cell inherits a complete genome. Here, we explore how DNA segregation and division are mechanistically coupled in ar...