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You may recall reading about the discovery of arbitrium, a peptide produced by Bacillus phages to regulate lysogeny decisions. A new paper by Avigail Stokar-Avihail and colleagues in the Sorek lab at the Weizmann Institute has shown that ar

Ho Bin Jang, Benjamin Bolduc and colleagues from the Sullivan lab at Ohio State University, along with several collaborators from the US, UK, Canada, France, and Belgium, have published a paper this week in Nature Biotechnology describing a

You may recall reading about the discovery of arbitrium, a peptide produced by Bacillus phages to regulate lysogeny decisions. A new paper by Avigail Stokar-Avihail and colleagues in the Sorek lab at the Weizmann Institute has shown that ar

Ho Bin Jang, Benjamin Bolduc and colleagues from the Sullivan lab at Ohio State University, along with several collaborators from the US, UK, Canada, France, and Belgium, have published a paper this week in Nature Biotechnology describing a

A new paper (published today!) by Ann Gregory and colleagues shows identification of almost 200,000 new viral populations in the ocean (this work comes in part from the Tara Oceans expedition). The work identifies interesting new biodiversi

The same group that brought us the fascinating study on filamentous phage Pf's influence on P. aeruginosa virulence has published another study on the same phage. This time, they describe Pf prevalence (high) and implications (increased ant

The same group that brought us the fascinating study on filamentous phage Pf's influence on P. aeruginosa virulence has published another study on the same phage. This time, they describe Pf prevalence (high) and implications (increased ant

A new paper (published today!) by Ann Gregory and colleagues shows identification of almost 200,000 new viral populations in the ocean (this work comes in part from the Tara Oceans expedition). The work identifies interesting new biodiversi

Justin Silpe and Bonnie Bassler discovered that a Vibrio cholerae phage senses its host’s quorum sensing molecules and lyses only when enough hosts are present in the surrounding area. By engineering this system, they got phages to lyse in

Jee-Hwan Oh and colleagues published a paper on how certain dietary sugars promote Lactobacillus phage production in the mouse gut.

Guy Schleyer and colleagues published a new paper on "in-plaque" mass spec imaging to visualize what happens during (algal) viral infection. Here's the original paper and a blog post on the work.

Stephen Wandro and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine have published a new paper on Enterococcus faecium phage evolution. His experiments, which he presented at Kisaco Research's North American Microbiome Congress last week,

A new virome twin study! J. Leonardo Moreno-Gallego and colleagues show that virome and microbiome diversity correlate, and in contrast to a prior study, adult twins DO have more similar viromes than unrelated individuals. They suggest that

Chen et al. published a groundbreaking new study on the discovery of a new kind of phage transduction that leads to genome hypermobility. You’ve heard of generalized and specialized transduction—now there's "lateral transduction."

Marco Cafora and colleagues have developed a zebrafish model of cystic fibrosis and used it to show that phage therapy can treat Pseudomonas aeruginosa (and modulate immune response in the fish). This is the first time that phage therapy ha

This week, several exciting new papers on the evolution of CRISPR-Cas systems were published. One, by Amelia McKitterick and colleagues from the Seed lab at UC Berkeley, shows how a phage-encoded CRISPR-Cas system interferes with an anti-ph

Johanna Sweere and colleagues just published a very exciting paper today in Science! A temperate filamentous phage of Pseudomonas aeruginosa dampens the immune response against P. aeruginosa, which leads to increased P. aeruginosa virulence

Sooyeon Song and colleagues have published a new paper showing that E. coli employs both active (lytic and temperate) and inactive phages (a cryptic prophage) to discriminate between nearby strains and control cell-cell contact according to

Benler and colleagues at San Diego State University published a new paper that shows that diversity-generating retroelements (which lead to hypervariable proteins) are present in many prophages found in bacteria that live in the human gut.

How much should we worry about phage-induced spreading of antibiotic resistance? This review by Clara Torres-Barceló lays out some contrasting viewpoints and data on the matter.