“I think it’s a real mistake to forget where the pipeline for all this begins.” John Diffley reflects on the importance of basic research, his mission to decode DNA replication and recreate it in the lab, and the scientific optimism of the 1960s that helped shape it. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-03...

Parasites of jumbo phages… 🤔 Muchas gracias, @jrpenades.bsky.social por tu excelente comentario. Much to discover. DNA moves through populations (and communities) at a pace that if we could measure, would stun. Bacteria: inert bags of froth? Hapless? There for the bidding? doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

@prczhaoyansong.bsky.social’s deep dive into the dark matter of compost communities is now out 🎉 Genomic islands hijack jumbo phages—whose capsids enable transfer of large tracts of DNA—shedding new light on the scale & scope of phage-mediated gene flow 😎 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Jumbo phage–mediated transduction of genomic islands | PNAS

Bacteria acquire new genes by horizontal gene transfer, typically mediated by mobile genetic elements (MGEs). While plasmids, bacteriophages, and c...

pnas.org

A new preprint! Data from a huge experiment by @prczhaoyansong.bsky.social show that similar microbial communities diverge depending on whether the carbon source is glucose or its polymer, cellulose. Diversity is comparable, but biomass, functions and taxonomy differ: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Diverse microbial communities assemble on both recalcitrant and labile carbon sources

Microbial community assembly is shaped by the nature of available resources, with labile carbon sources such as glucose often expected to support low diversity due to rapid growth and competitive excl...

biorxiv.org

@prczhaoyansong.bsky.social posted an update of elegant work on genomic islands. Captured via real-time expts, the GIs define a widespread class of MGE (eg VPI-1 de V. cholerae), encode a diverse cargo of genes & exploit jumbo phages for horizontal transfer 😎👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Jumbo phage-mediated transduction of genomic islands

Bacteria acquire new genes by horizontal gene transfer (HGT), typically mediated by mobile genetic elements (MGEs). While plasmids, bacteriophages and certain integrative and conjugative elements (ICE...

biorxiv.org

Congratulations to @prczhaoyansong.bsky.social for receiving a Best Poster Prize at the EMBO Workshop. His work shows that jumbo phages can help bacteria move genomic islands from one cell to another. www.evolbio.mpg.de/3816203/crac... #Microbiology #PhageBiology #GeneTransfer #EMBO2025

Cracking a Bacterial Mystery: Yansong Zhao Awarded Prize for New Discoveries

evolbio.mpg.de