Phages are typically viewed as very rapidly evolving biological entities. Little is known, however, about whether and how phages can establish long-term genetic stability. We addressed this eco-evolut...

Peptidoglycan (PG) is a crucial biopolymer in the bacterial cell wall that has been the subject of intense study since it was first isolated in the early 1950s (1, 2). Over the last 70 years, extensive research has expanded our understanding of the structure and function of this microbial biopolymer. Recent advances in mass spectrometry and bioinformatics have revolutionized PG analysis, enabling a comprehensive detection of individual components and their global composition within bacterial cells. Like genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, peptidoglycomics is the non-targeted, non-biased detection of all elements that comprise the overall PG structure. Peptidoglycomic analyses can identify and monitor hundreds of potential compositional changes that occur within the PG structure of a cell. By comparison, traditional methods of analyzing PG composition only distinguish a relatively limited number of PG components. Therefore, peptidoglycomic approaches produce a detailed global overview of the PG structural elements and give unprecedented insight into the physiological function of this biopolymer within the bacterial cell.

The authors developed a screen to find compounds that modulate intracellular Staphylococcus aureus metabolism and discovered KL1, which sensitizes persisters to antibiotics by reversing host-induced tolerance.

The skin microbiome is dominated by a few key genera, among which Staphylococcus is one of the most well characterized. Recent studies have examined the roles of various Staphylococcus species such as...

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Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) accelerate evolution by rapidly diversifying variable proteins. The human gastrointestinal microbiota harbors the greatest density of DGRs known in nature, su...

MetaGraph enables scalable indexing of large sets of DNA, RNA or protein sequences using annotated de Bruijn graphs.

Life on Earth has existed for nearly 4 billion years, and for most of that time, it was microbial (1). The diverse world we see around us today owes its entire existence to a few foundational events c...

Scientists, research institutions, funders, libraries and publishers must all improve software practices.

Phage therapy is a promising alternative to antibiotics to treat multidrug resistant infections. Plasmid dependent phages (PDPs) are particularly attractive as therapeutics because they can both kill ...

VAD is a Viral AlphaFold Database of protein monomers and homodimers from viruses infecting hosts across the tree of life.