As a leading research institution for microbial biotechnology the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences - Biotechnology (IBG-1, https://www.fz-juelich.de/de/ibg/ibg-1 ) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich foc...

Genomes contain orders of magnitude more open reading frames (ORFs) than known protein coding genes, and recent work suggests there may be unannotated proteins present in even the best studied organisms. To address this gap, we used a high throughput reverse genetic toolkit to construct precise C-terminal fusions of a reporter (and control) to >120,000 ORFs in model E. coli . We found hundreds of unannotated significant hits, and individually detected >50 novel polypeptides by western blot, including ORFs within tRNA loci. Many ORFs overlap annotated genes in the sense orientation, and we found these are likely chimeric polypeptides produced by ribosomal frameshifting. Using degron based knockdowns, we identified unannotated proteins that have putative fitness effects, and we found a novel small protein that displays phenotypes consistent with a role in the mRNA degradosome. The observation of a range of unannotated translation products should lead to better annotation and understanding of the bacterial domain of life and motivates the continued exploration of genomes broadly. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Rodrigues and Queiroz et al. report the discovery of Naiavirus, the largest enveloped virus, isolated from a Brazil biome. With an oval capsid and flexible tail, its giant genome holds many novel gene...

The majority of Legionnaires’ disease is linked to phage-directed, coincidental selection for virulence in the environment.

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...

Bacteria encode an enormous diversity of defense systems including restriction-modification and CRISPR-Cas that cleave nucleic acid to protect against phage infection. Bioinformatic analyses demonstra...

The West African–South American lineage of Vibrio cholerae contains multiple distinct anti-phage defence systems that provide resistance to various phage families, including vibriophage ICP1, a key pr...

Lund is strategically positioned close to the continent, hosting major national and European research infrastructures, such as MAX.IV Laboratory and the European Spallation Source (ESS). In the field

Biologics are delivered to the gut using phage that infects resident commensal bacteria.

Here, using ribosomal profiling, the authors characterize the translatome of HIV-1 revealing tens of alternative open reading frames (ARF) that encode conserved viral antigens and show that ARF-derive...

Nature - Discovery and engineering of the antibody response to a prominent skin commensal