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A Science paper by Samuel J. Hobbs and Philip J. Kranzusch reports that phage prohead protease activity activates the CD-NTase enzymes of bacterial CBASS defence: the authors reconstitute CBASS recognition of phage T4 in vitro, identify cle

TattleTail is a rule-based bioinformatic pipeline for identifying canonical pyocin-encoding gene clusters in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It targets the characteristic trpE–trpG-associated loci, combining conserved pyocin genes with exclusion of

A Nature Microbiology study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley and Penn State presents a phylogeny-agnostic machine-learning framework that predicts strain-level phage–host interactions across diverse bacterial genera f

A Nature Microbiology study from ETH Zürich, University Hospital Basel, the University of Basel and the University of Lausanne presents HIDEN-SEQ (hidden Acr-enabled transposon-insertion sequencing), which systematically links viral genes t

Phage Tn-seq is a transposon-based approach to studying phage gene essentiality and engineering. Nature Microbiology

A Nature Communications study from Stanford University and collaborators used a mouse model of established Pseudomonas aeruginosa wound infection to compare phage route, dose and frequency: topical, but not systemic, delivery reduced wound

Engineered non-pathogenic E. coli producing lytic phages protected mice against Salmonella infection in a preclinical proof-of-concept study. Nature Microbiology

This review surveys more than 80 phage bioinformatics tools for identification, assembly, annotation, taxonomy, lifestyle, defence, and host prediction. It compares sequence homology, machine learning, and foundation-model approaches, then

Bignaud, Lamy-Besnier, Koszul, Debarbieux, Marbouty and colleagues followed the 3D organization of the virulent phage PAK_P3 genome during infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The phage genome rapidly decondenses into a specific 3D organiza

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