If you are anything like us, whenever you plan a journey, you spend a remarkable amount of time thinking about the start and the middle. Is everything packed? What time should we leave? Will there be ...

In many bacteria, the DnaA protein, responsible for chromosome replication initiation, also acts as a transcription factor regulating its own gene expression and the expression of other loci. Here, we ...

When bacteria cells replicate, they do so a little differently than human cells do. They don't undergo mitosis, a splitting that involves construction of spindles to carefully separate the DNA after ...

Bioinformaticians have established that the genes in bacterial genomes are arranged in a meaningful order. They describe that the genes are arranged by function: If they become increasingly important ...

The newly described Panoptes bacterial immune system detects phage evasion by sensing the loss of nucleotide signals that ...

When a virus enters a cell, its top priority is to replicate its genome rapidly, creating new viruses to infect elsewhere. The host has the opposite priority: to destroy the virus, ideally before it ...

Researchers have analyzed ancient DNA from Borrelia recurrentis, a type of bacteria that causes relapsing fever, pinpointing when it evolved to spread through lice rather than ticks, and how it gained ...

When you think of viruses, you probably think of flu-like symptoms and quarantines. Humankind has suffered from viral diseases ranging from smallpox to COVID-19, hantavirus and Ebola since the dawn of ...

Ancient bacterial DNA offers rare insights into how microbes evolved alongside their hosts and how they connect to species living today. Bacteria, the earliest life on Earth, evolved around 4 billion ...