Phages communicate across species to shape microbial ecosystems Arbitrium is a communication system that helps bacteriophages decide between lysis and lysogeny via secreted peptides. In arbitrium, the AimP peptide binds its cognate AimR receptor to repress aimX ex...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#microsky #phagesky #phage

Synteny-aware functional annotation of bacteriophage genomes with Phynteny Accurate genome annotation is fundamental to decoding viral diversity and understanding bacteriophage biology; yet, the majority of bacteriophage genes remain functionally uncharacterised. Bacteriopha...

🚨 New preprint 🚨

My phage annotation tool, Phynteny, finally has a preprint and a brand new version powered by a cool AI transformer architecture and protein language models! #phagesky

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Gut-Brain Axis Takes Center Stage A rapid expansion of new discoveries and knowledge lays the foundation for a new era in medicine

Spotlight on the gut-brain axis
A rapid expansion of new discoveries and knowledge lays the foundation for a new era in medicine
erictopol.substack.com/p/the-gut-br...

Left barplot shows that as mock community microbiome sample is diluted, qPCR and metagenomics continue to detect all taxa but 16S detects only Cutibacterium. Right barplot shows that for qPCR and metagenomics detect a diverse average microbiome from lower leg skin but 16S composition is dominated by Cutibacterium.

In high biomass samples, sequencing methods are comparable – however, as biomass decreases, minor taxa are rapidly lost with 16S as the limited amplicon library becomes biased towards the most abundant taxon. 2/4

Excellent and thought provoking!

Is the episomal exclusion strategy a form of anti-phage defense?
I find it amusing to read that resistance-associated mutations were not attributed to this phenomenon. What could the mechanism possibly be

Impressive! Could this be a possible evolutionary trajectory behind staphylococcal pathogenicity islands?

Interesting! Considering minimal costs of these integrons, I wonder if these brics are then vertically transmitted to daughter cells even under the absence of selective pressures

Nematodes wearing bacterial coats.

Nikolaus Leisch at #EESWildModels