YouTube video by SMTPB

Microbial communities play essential roles in shaping ecosystem functions and predictive modeling frameworks are crucial for understanding, controlling, and harnessing their properties. Competition an...

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.

Plasmids are now the primary vectors of antimicrobial resistance, but our understanding of how human industrialisation of antibiotics influenced their evolution is limited by a paucity of data predati...

Only a fraction of bacterial genomes encode CRISPR-Cas systems but the selective causes of this variation are unexplained. How naturally virulent bacteriophages (phages) select for CRISPR immunity has...

Panoptes, an anti-phage defence system against virus-mediated immune suppression, is revealed.

Kubota et al. show that bacteria can use their filamentous phage to outcompete other bacteria, but increased phage production enables the evolution of cheater miniphages with truncated genomes. Miniphages exploit full-length phages and lower total phage production, causing some bacteria to lose their prophages and any associated fitness benefits.