In a groundbreaking study using Merino sheep, researchers uncovered that tiny genetic variations within gut microbes can ...

By making the world's microbial DNA easier to explore, a new sequence alignment tool, LexicMap, lets scientists search for a DNA sequence against millions of bacterial and archaeal genomes in minutes, ...

Human bodies are teeming with trillions of microbial cells that comprise the microbiome, many of them bacteria. Although they may be small, some of these bacteria maintain health, but others promote ...

The direct recovery of microbial genomes from complex environments is now routine. Going from environmental genomes to laboratory experiments is rare, but the tide is turning. A. Murat Eren is at the ...

Researchers have now developed a new single-cell genome technique to understand how bacteria interact and exchange genetic material, including antibiotic resistance genes at the individual cell level.

A new technique will make it much easier for researchers to discover the traits or activities encoded by genes of unknown function in microbes, a key step toward understanding the roles and impact of ...

The researchers used Merino sheep as an animal model, systematically collecting samples of their hindgut and ruminal ...

So, the researchers took the tooth of a mammoth that lived over a million years ago and analyzed it, finding traces of ancient bacteria. This is the oldest ‘host associated microbial DNA’ ever ...

The viruses in question are bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria – they can’t infect humans, or any other animals for ...

Viruses are so simple in their structure, they may not even qualify as living things. Yet, they are ruthless in their robotic ...

Most bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab—and that's been bad news for medicine. Many of our frontline antibiotics originated from microbes, yet as antibiotic resistance spreads and drug pipelines ...