How do bacteria - harmless ones living in our bodies, or those that cause disease - organize their activities? A new study, combining powerful genomic-scale microscopy with a technical innovation, ...

Phages are viruses that attack bacteria by injecting their DNA, then usurping bacterial machinery to reproduce. Eventually, ...

Transformation is a genetic exchange mechanism by which “naked” DNA is taken up by bacteria. This newly acquired DNA may include genes that enable bacteria to perform tasks that were previously ...

Fifteen years later, a trio of researchers at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, demonstrated that this ...

Antibiotic resistance is a global public health crisis responsible for more than a million deaths annually. By 2050, the ...

“Wild stuff does happen.” The trillions of bacteria in our bodies regularly exchange DNA with each other, but the idea that their genes could end up in human DNA has been very controversial. In 2001, ...

This plasmid can be introduced into a bacterium by way of the process called transformation. Then, because bacteria divide rapidly, they can be used as factories to copy DNA fragments in large ...

Importantly, the same DNA sequencing technology that can identify bacterial “fingerprints” can also identify points of attack for clinicians. The researchers found success identifying separate ...

The Nature Communications study was conducted by scientists from the Agency for Science, Technology ... DNA sequencing, the ...

However, bacteria also have numerous defense mechanisms aimed at eliminating any foreign DNA entering their cells. "Conjugation is a well-known process that scientists also use in the lab to ...

Restriction enzymes are one of the most important tools in the recombinant DNA technology toolbox ... These plates contain colonies of bacteria. These colonies remind me of a city with many ...