The human protozoan parasite Entamoeba histolytica feeds on intestinal microbiota to survive. To enhance the effectiveness of probiotics, we characterized how they respond to amoeba predators. We foun...

The virus-host arms race is a major component of the evolutionary process in all organisms that drove the evolution of a broad variety of immune mechanisms. In the last few years, over 200 distinct antivirus defense systems have been discovered in prokaryotes. There are two major modes of immunity acquisition: innate immune systems spread through microbial populations via HGT, whereas adaptive-type immune systems acquire immunity via direct interaction with the virus. We developed a mathematical model to explore the short-term evolution of prokaryotic immunity and showed that in stable environments with predictable viral repertoires, adaptive-type immunity is the optimal defense strategy, whereas in fluctuating environments with unpredictable virus composition, HGT dominates the immune landscape.

Recent advances in post-translational regulatory tools have enabled precise and rapid control of metabolic flux in microbial cell factories. In this review, we systematically summarize current post-tr...

Bacteria interact with both abiotic and biotic factors in their environment. Quorum sensing (QS) is one mechanism that bacteria use to communicate with other bacteria and coordinate behaviors in the p...

The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here, we designed and generated Escherichia coli with a 4-megabase synthetic genome in whic...

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...

The bacterial dynamin-like protein DynA from Bacillus subtilis plays a key role in phage defense. It binds the plasma membrane through a unique paddle domain in its D1 subunit. This membrane associat....

Historically, ecosystems frameworks have been leveraged to understand and examine the functions of living organisms within various environments, particularly...

Here the authors leverage a crossfeeding, engineered microbial community to demonstrate that strain abundance cycles are robust across environmental conditions. They pair this with a nonlinear dynamic model to elucidate population cycles.

A new study has, for the first time, uncovered a connection between bacteria living in Norway spruce needles and gold nanoparticles. This discovery could pave the way for environmentally friendly…

In this Consensus Statement, a consortium of microbiome scientists discuss current sequencing data sharing policies and propose the use of a Data Reuse Information (DRI) tag to promote equitable and collaborative data sharing.

The climate crisis is one of the most urgent and complex challenges of our time. Although often overlooked in models and policy, microorganisms play a crit