• Prophage Mas­quer­ade

    by Merry Youle — Roseo­var­ius nu­bin­hibens re­cently joined the ex­clu­sive club of about a thou­sand bac­te­ria whose genomes have been se­quenced. Why this honor? It's a mem­ber of one of the most ubiq­ui­tous and most in­tensely stud­ied clades of α‑Proteobacteria, the ma­rine roseobac­ters. This pop­u­lous group...

  • You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover

    by Merry — Bac­te­ria run a tight ship. Com­pared to many "higher" plants and an­i­mals, they have a larger pro­por­tion of cod­ing and reg­u­la­tory DNA, a lesser per­cent­age of "junk" DNA. Nev­er­the­less, there is some "junk," in­clud­ing, among other things, relics of past in­fec­tion by tem­per­ate phages. These "de­fec­tive prophages" of­ten in­clude...