phage

Mixtures of viruses that attack inflammatory bowel disease–causing bacteria in mice also survive the digestive tract and are well-tolerated in humans, a study finds.

Bacteria-infecting viruses affect the composition and behavior of microbes in the mammalian gut—and perhaps influence human biology.

Phages interact with bacteria and eukaryotic cells in ways that researchers suspect influence mammalian health.

The mysterious DNA sequences appear to help bacterial cells spot when they’ve been infected with viruses—and prompt those cells to self-destruct.

The gastrointestinal tracts of people with major depressive disorder harbor a signature composition of viruses, bacteria, and their metabolic products, according to the most comprehensive genomic and metabolomic analysis in depression to date.

Tweaking the genomes of two phages and combining them with a third phage helped to clear a persistent Mycobacterium infection in the patient.

Phages that die during bacterial invasion help other viruses defeat the microbes’ immune responses.

The findings more than double the number of known defense mechanisms, piquing the interests of molecular biology tool developers.

Phage therapy is but one example of using biological entities to reduce our reliance on antibiotics and other failing chemical solutions.

In Chapter 3, “The Enemy of Our Enemy Is Our Friend: Infecting the Infection,” author Emily Monosson makes the case for bacteriophage therapy in the treatment of infectious disease.

When engineered to use a four-billion-year-old version of the protein thioredoxin, the bacteria can stall bacteriophage replication, a new study shows.

The latest CRISPR deactivators to be discovered turn off the Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 widely used in genome editing.

In bacteriophage genomes, researchers find three anti-CRISPR proteins that naturally inhibit CRISPR-Cas9 in one bacterial species and can do the same in human cells. 

Researchers find evidence of antibiotic resistance genes in the DNA of viruses that infect bacteria.

In the DNA of the WO phage, which infects arthropod-inhabiting Wolbachia, researchers find sequences related to a black widow spider’s toxin and other animal genes.

A bacteriophage must evolve certain variants of a protein or die.

Anti-CRISPR proteins are prevalent in phage genomes and bacterial mobile genetic elements, researchers show.