• A Mi­cro­bial Utopia: Cheese

    by Nathan Jayne, Amanda Alker, and Nathalie Del­herbe — Over the past decade, there have been many large scale at­tempts to char­ac­ter­ize bac­te­r­ial com­mu­ni­ties, from soil and ocean mi­cro­bio­mes to hu­man mi­cro­bio­mes. There is even a col­lec­tive ef­fort to pro­file the Earth's mi­cro­biome. Sci­en­tists are not only in­ter­ested in know­ing who is there and what they are do­ing, but also how...

  • Say, Brother, Can You Spare a DNA?

    by Merry — Men­tion hor­i­zon­tal gene trans­fer (HGT) in bac­te­ria, and what comes to mind is the ac­qui­si­tion of new traits and ca­pa­bil­i­ties across large evo­lu­tion­ary dis­tances. Not so for the neis­se­riae. For them, HGT is a means to swap genes with other mem­bers of the species and to main­tain...