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A Nature Communications Review by Sam P. B. van Beljouw and Li Yuping (Biozentrum, University of Basel) on jumbo bacteriophages, whose double-stranded DNA genomes exceed 200 kb. It covers their diversity, evolutionary origins, distinctive m

A meta-analysis of 12 infant cohorts across 8 countries (1,893 samples from 999 infants) models gut virome development over the first three years of life. Viral richness rose significantly over the first eight months alongside a loss of com

Cui and colleagues report in Science Advances that Acinetobacter baumannii makes 2′,3′-cyclic nucleotide monophosphates (2′,3′-cNMPs) with the ribonuclease RnaA and senses them through the receptor protein CRPAb, which affects the interacti

In this preprint, a 1:1 Loop and Spear cocktail did not improve bacterial suppression over Loop alone and showed multiplicity-dependent antagonism. In a Galleria mellonella larvae infection model, only sequential treatment with Spear follow

A high-throughput platform identified gut phages that adhere to epithelial layers and the immunoglobulin (Ig)-like domain proteins that mediate it: displayed on a non-adherent phage, they confer epithelial binding and internalization in vit

Parallel sequential fluorescence in situ hybridization (par-seqFISH) profiled the transcriptional activity of individual phage lambda genomes during synchronized infection of E. coli. Cells pursuing lysogeny show consensus activity among al

Meijer, Skiadas, Rainey, Hogeweg and Dutilh tracked viral dynamics in 20 compost-derived microbial communities over one year and observed massive, parallel outbreaks of Theomophage, a previously uncharacterized member of the Schitoviridae t

Metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metabolic modelling followed a thermophilic CO2-converting (biomethanation) trickle bed reactor over 353 days of stepwise gas-feed perturbations, tracking single nucleotide variant trajectories in both

The study presents DepoCatalog, an experimentally validated collection of 129 recombinantly prepared Klebsiella phage depolymerases across 75 KL-types, and proposes a five-class framework for their diversity. The accompanying DepoCat databa

Science news feature by Richard Stone (Science 392, issue 6800, May 21, 2026, pp. 800-804), whose standfirst states that key human defenses against pathogens were forged billions of years ago in microbial battles with viruses. Science — "Br

Researchers profiled 95 Pseudomonas phages against 99 clinical isolates and trained strain-specific models to predict infectivity. In a single held-out strain in vivo, the model-designed cocktail produced a higher median CFU reduction than

PHAGE4DAIR, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by Qeen Biotechnologies (Canada), runs from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2031 with an EU contribution of €14,869,038.73. It is a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, adaptive P

Using the Klebsiella podophages KP32, K11 and KP34, the authors validated the interaction between the primary RBP branching domain and the secondary RBP docking peptide. They used this interaction to engineer a KP32 scaffold that propagated

Biochemistry, cryo-electron microscopy and single-molecule imaging show that Hna, a broadly distributed anti-phage system that triggers abortive infection, is a 3'-5' single-stranded DNA exonuclease forming an auto-inhibited dimer under phy

A structural and functional study of QatB and QatC, two components of the four-protein QatABCD anti-phage defense system. QatC bound to the ATP analog AMPPNP and the QatB-QatC heterodimer were solved, and structural analysis suggests QatB m

More than two-thirds of Streptococcus thermophilus strains harbor a phage satellite structurally similar to Staphylococcus aureus pathogenicity islands (SaPIs). Virulent phages can trigger induction of these satellites, and their DNA can th

A metagenomic study of 450 virus-enriched honey bee gut samples from 63 hives across eight European countries, three seasons and three gut sections catalogues a diverse phageome, including many phages that appear to belong to novel taxa and

A Nature Communications Perspective by Aleksandra Petrović-Fabijan and Stephen T. Abedon argues that phage therapy must move beyond anecdote to clinical reproducibility, and identifies three foundational pillars to be addressed through inte

Lytic selection and evolution (LySE) is a T7-based method for near-continuous directed evolution of bacterial gene clusters that keeps discrete checkpoints: a hypermutagenic T7 DNA polymerase mutates a target gene cluster carried on a T7 ph

V-score and VL-score are annotation-free metrics that quantify the "virus-likeness" of protein families and genomes, released with an open-access searchable database, V-Score-Search. Applied to public protein databases they link 19-59% of p