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/...

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...

@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...

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