The canonical lytic–lysogenic binary has been challenged in recent years, as more evidence has emerged on alternative bacteriophage infection strategies. These infection modes are little studied, and ...

The rapid evolution of microbiology as a field of research has led to the introduction of new terminology and the adaptation of existing terms. However, inconsistencies in the use of these terms, inc...

International Soil Virus Conference 2026! We are excited to announce and provide RSVP details for the next International Soil Virus Conference that will be held in Saint-Loup Lamaire, France on Jun…

We seek a creative, collaborative, and visionary plant biologist to establish an internationally recognized research program at the forefront of plant-microbe interactions aimed at understanding how t...

This Perspective discusses virus-encoded auxiliary metabolic genes and provides a framework for the biological interpretation of these genes.

Phage-plasmids are temperate phages that replicate as plasmids during lysogeny. Despite their high diversity, they carry genes similar to phages and plasmids. This leads to gene exchanges, and to the ...

YouTube video by John Innes Centre

As important mobile elements in prokaryotes, prophages shape the genomic context of their hosts and regulate the structure of bacterial populations. However, it is challenging to precisely identify prophages through computational methods. Here, we introduce PIDE for identifying prophages from bacterial genomes or metagenome-assembled genomes. PIDE integrates a pre-trained protein language model and gene density clustering algorithm to distinguish prophages. Benchmarking with induced prophage sequencing datasets demonstrates that PIDE pinpoints prophages with precise boundaries. Applying PIDE to 4744 human gut representative genomes reveals 24,467 prophages with widespread functional capacity. PIDE is available at https://github.com/chyghy/PIDE , with model training code at https://zenodo.org/records/16457629 .

The microbial composition of metagenomes is identified in seconds by profiling against large databases.

By combining ultra-deep short-read shotgun metagenomic sequencing with 5-sample co-assembly across 600 agricultural soil samples, we significantly enhanced the representation and recovery of microbia....

The Department of Plant Pathology in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) at the University of Georgia is recruiting for the position of Assistant or Associate Professor in Fu...