From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Bacteria employ a range of competition systems that deliver toxins to inhibit competing strains. This study shows that these systems are particularly important for the ecology of virulent and antibiot...

Babies and older adults are eligible for this newly available protection

The nature of standing genetic variation remains a central debate in population genetics, with differing perspectives on whether common variants are almost always neutral as suggested by neutral and n...

Antimicrobial resistance is responsible for some 1.2 million deaths a year a year and contributes to millions more. Data in the new report shows that the problem is growing at an alarming rate.

An Open Letter to U.S. STEM Leadership on the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) has transformed structural biology by providing high-resolution insights into biological macromolecules. We report s…

Temperate phages oscillate between lysogeny, a genomic maintenance state within a bacterial host, and lytic replication, in which the host is killed, and newly made phage particles are released. Successful transmission to new hosts requires that temperate phages appropriately time their transitions from lysogeny to lysis. It is well understood that temperate phages trigger lysis upon detection of host cell stress. Understanding of the breadth of cues that induce lysis expanded with the discovery of phages carrying quorum-sensing receptor genes that promote lytic induction exclusively at high host cell density. Bacteria engage in a cell-cell communication process called quorum sensing, which relies on the production, release, accumulation, and group-wide detection of extracellular signal molecules called autoinducers. Bacteria use quorum sensing to monitor changes in population density and synchronize collective behaviors. The temperate phage VP882 (jVP882) encodes VqmAj – a homolog of its host’s quorum-sensing receptor/transcription factor VqmA. VqmAj allows jVP882 to detect the accumulation of the host autoinducer called DPO. Presumably, launching the lytic induction program at high host cell density maximizes jVP882 transmission to new hosts. Here, by mining sequence databases for linear plasmid phages, we identify VP882-like phages in multiple DPO-producing bacterial species isolated at diverse times and geographic locations. We show that the VqmAj homologs can indeed detect DPO and, in response, activate the lytic pathway. Our observation indicates that jVP882 is a member of a large family of globally-dispersed quorum-sensing-responsive temperate phages.

The Drosophila Genetic Database, FlyBase, is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden termination of the FlyBase NIH grant, which includes salaries for 5 literature curators based at the University ...

Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 27 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41579-025-01156-zIn this Review, Penadés et al. explore the genetics, potential origins and life cycle of phage satellites, and they discuss the impact of these elements on the evolution of other mobile genetic elements and their host bacteria.