Deep in coastal mangroves and even inside our own mouths, biologists are finding that DNA does not always sit in a simple loop at the cell’s center. A giant microbe called Thiovulum imperiosus has now ...

Plasmids, small circular DNA molecules found in bacteria, may contain antibiotic-resistance genes and have the ability to replicate independently. Bacteria can transfer these plasmids to one another, ...

Nobody wants to be average. But for a long time, scientists have found it convenient to think of bacterial cells as just that: "average." Researchers have traditionally relied on population-level ...

Pushing into a new chapter of technologically advanced biological sensors, scientists from the University of California San Diego and their colleagues in Australia have engineered bacteria that can ...

Microbiologists have long known that ancient, inactive viruses known as cryptic prophages can insert their genetic material into bacterial DNA. These genetic fragments allow bacteria to use ...

As the number of antibiotic-resistant infections continues to rise, scientists are looking to bacteriophages (“phages”), viruses that infect bacteria, as an approach to tackling antibiotic resistance.

Scientists from UC San Diego and Australia have engineered bacteria that detect the presence of tumor DNA in live organisms. Photo credit: today.ucsd.edu/ Scientists from UC San Diego, along with ...

Colibactin is a powerful toxin produced by Escherichia coli and other bacteria living in the human gut. This highly unstable bacterial product causes mutations in DNA that have been linked to ...

Certain gut bacteria have been linked to colon cancer, but now they might get a chance at redemption. Scientists have engineered “pickpocket” bacteria to detect colorectal cancer, with a 100% success ...