Great fun presenting some of our research @otagomicroimmuno.bsky.social @universityofotago.bsky.social
Including transposon mutagenesis of phages.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Phages are important drivers of bacterial evolution with therapeutic potential as antimicrobials. However, gaps in our understanding of phages and our inability to rapidly engineer them with new genetic cargo hinders progress towards phage-based therapies. To address the lack of unbiased, genome-wide mutational tools for phages, we developed transposon mutagenesis employing CRISPR-anti-CRISPR (Acr)-based selection and deep-sequencing (Phage Tn-seq). Transposon mutagenesis was effective for phages with unmodified or hypermodified genomes and a jumbo phage that protects its DNA within a nucleus. Phage Tn-seq enabled phage gene essentiality assignment consistent with structural proteomics and core gene conservation. Insertion biases allowed prediction of transcriptional direction and early injected phage DNA regions. We exploited the method to rapidly deliver new cargo to phage genomes in just a few days and used an AI-designed Acr to expand the phage transposon toolbox. Phage Tn-seq is a versatile tool to advance our understanding and applications of phages. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Royal Society Te Apārangi, https://ror.org/04tajb587 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, https://ror.org/012kf4317 The L’Oréal Groupe Australia University of Otago, https://ror.org/01jmxt844
Arabinose isn't only an inducer!
@peterfineran.bsky.social gave a talk in our Hebrew Univ. microbiology journal club and mentioned his recent amazing finding that some phages add up to 3 arabinoses (!!) to their DNA to evade bacterial defense.
Mahler et al. CHM 2025
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
