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This study reports that a short prokaryotic argonaute protein from the archaeon Sulfolobus islandicus and its genetically associated proteins Aga1 and Aga2 confer antiviral defence by abortive infection.
Two recent studies highlight the potential of broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibodies for the long-term control of HIV in the absence of antiretroviral therapy.
This Genome Watch highlights how metagenomics can fill the knowledge gap of the wild avian gut microbiome and enable the early detection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria with implications for public health policy and conservation management.
In this Review, Wang and colleagues review the strategies microbial pathogens use to evade plant immunity for successful infection. They highlight how microbial effectors manipulate host cellular processes involved in immune sensing, signal integration and defence execution and how to exploit this knowledge to engineer crop resistance.
To maintain genome integrity and ensure cell survival, bacteria have evolved several DNA repair pathways to repair different types of DNA damage and non-canonical bases, including strand breaks, nucleotide modifications, cross-links, mismatches and ribonucleotide incorporations. In this Review, Wozniak and Simmons provide a contemporary discussion of the excision-based mechanisms bacteria use to repair the diverse set of lesions they encounter.
Combining several antibiotics, either in mixtures or sequential order, is proposed to increase treatment efficacy and reduce resistance evolution. In this Review, Andersson and colleagues discuss the effects of antibiotic combinations, the directional effects of previous antibiotic treatments and the role of stress-response systems as well as the interactions between drugs and resistance mutations.
Chemotaxis is one of the best studied bacterial behaviours, but the underlying mechanisms are much better understood than the reasons and consequences of chemotaxis. In this Review, Keegstra et al. discuss the costs and benefits both for individual bacteria and whole populations.
