Topic
Viruses that infect bacteria, the most numerous and varied group of viruses known, many of which have a protein head and a tail used to inject DNA.
University of Chicago researchers used cryo-EM to capture large serine integrases at several stages of inserting and removing phage DNA. The Molecular Cell paper shows how a partner protein flips the enzyme from one job to the other.
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ISTA biologists report that starving E. coli use phages and CRISPR-Cas to swap and absorb DNA more than 100 times as often as spontaneous mutation. The team describes it as a primitive form of sexual reproduction that may speed how populations adapt.
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Anna Carratala's team at EPFL sampled 24 Swiss alpine lakes and found bacterial communities that weakened three viruses those lakes never harbour. Human uses are far off; the near-term promise is in protecting crops.
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University of Otago researchers built a CRISPR method that disrupts genes across whole phage genomes to tell the essential from the dispensable. Reported in Nature Microbiology, the same transposon can also carry new genes in, so it maps function and engineers it in one step.
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Anthropic's new in-house molecular biology lab says a 21.5 hour agent run turned a 1.9 billion cluster database into 19 reports for humans to read, and one of them described a repeat array nobody had recorded.
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Some bacteria build particles from domesticated virus parts and die to release them, handing pieces of their own genome to relatives. Antibiotic resistance genes can ride along, and a gene cluster controls the switch.
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