• Retrons Re­solved

    by Me­chas Zam­brano — Just like solv­ing a cross­word puz­zle or a su­doku, it is also greatly grat­i­fy­ing when ap­par­ently ob­scure sci­en­tific obser­vations are fig­ured out. There are many ex­am­ples in mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy of ob­ser­va­tions that, though they hint at some bi­o­log­i­cal...

  • Wily Phage Trumps Host Toxin

    by Merry Youle — Toxin-an­ti­toxin (TA) sys­tems are a dime a dozen. They are found on plas­mids and chro­mo­somes within many prokary­ote groups—even those with an in­tra­cel­lu­lar lifestyle. Each is a two-gene operon, one gene en­cod­ing a toxin pro­tein, the other the cog­nate an­ti­toxin. Key to their func­tion is the dif­fer­en­tial sta­bil­ity of the…

  • And We Thought We Knew What CRISPRs Do!

    by Merry Youle — Imag­ine that you have been grow­ing Pseudomonas aerug­i­nosa strain PA14 in your lab for some time, study­ing biofilm for­ma­tion among other things. A stu­dent in your lab iso­lates a phage, dubbed DMS3, that me­di­ates gen­er­al­ized trans­duc­tion be­tween this and other P. aerug­i­nosa strains. Oddly, this strain, when lyso­g­e­nized by DMS3…