Background: Variation within the prokaryotic pangenome is not random, and natural selection that favours particular combinations of genes appears to dominate over random drift. What is less clear is w...

Plasmids are autonomously replicating DNA molecules that stably coexist with chromosomes in bacterial cells. These genetic elements drive horizontal gene transfer and play a fundamental role in bacter...

pOXA-48 plasmids have emerged as key vectors of carbapenem resistance within Enterobacteriaceae. In this study, the authors use a transposon sequencing (Tn-seq) approach to identify genetic determinan...

pOXA-48 plasmids have emerged as key vectors of carbapenem resistance within Enterobacteriaceae. In this study, the authors use a transposon sequencing (Tn-seq) approach to identify genetic determinan...

Nature Communications - This study investigates the effects of the carbapenem resistance plasmid pOXA-48 in clinical enterobacteria. Using CRISPRi screens, the authors revealed that the...

Zhang, Todeschini, and Wu et al. show that the bacterial defense system Kiwa senses phage attachment at the membrane and assembles a transmembrane complex that halts infection by blocking phage DNA re...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Schmidtke et al. demonstrate that C. communis, a ubiquitous human gut phage that evades conventional plaque-based isolation, predominately replicates as a low-copy linear phage-plasmid with a broad ho...

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 21 July 2025; doi:10.1038/s41576-025-00867-6In this Review, Ascensao and Desai discuss how methodological advances in genotype and phenotype manipulation are transforming experimental evolution approaches and providing new insights into the underlying genetics and forces that shape phenotypic evolution.

Abstract. Transfer RNA (tRNA) modifications have emerged as critical post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression affecting diverse biological and di

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...

The capacity of a plasmid to express genes is constrained by parameters such as its length and copy number. Here, Maddamsetti et al. present a computational method that enables rapid and accurate dete...

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...

Synthetic and biological chemistry are traditionally seen as separate fields. Now, a biocompatible chemical reaction enables an engineered microbe to convert plastic waste into valuable compounds unde...

The respiratory tract microbiome (RTM) trains the immune system and protects against infections. Changes in the RTM are linked to various respiratory diseases. High-throughput methodologies and compu...

A new lasso peptide antibiotic exhibits broad-spectrum activity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria by interfering with bacterial protein synthesis, is unaffected by common resistanc...

Abstract. Conjugative plasmids, major vehicles for the spread of antibiotic resistance genes, often contain multiple toxin–antitoxin (TA) systems. However,