Reinventing the fight against bacteria,
one phage at a time.

One of the most unusual arms races in microbiology is about to receive major European funding. Yuping Li, microbiologist and tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, has been awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant worth €1.5 million over five years to investigate how bacteria detect and stop jumbophages — exceptionally large bacteriophages whose infection strategies can allow them to evade some of the best-known bacterial immune systems. Yuping Li - Biozentrum Basel The ERC-funded project is titled “Special phages call for special defences: mechanisms underlying immune sensing of nucleus-forming jumbophages.” Its central question is deceptively simple: if these giant phages physically shield their genetic material from bacterial immunity, how do bacteria nevertheless recognize that an infection is taking place? Answering that question could reveal previously unknown principles of bacterial immunity, expose key proteins used by jumboph...

Urinary tract infections are often presented as straightforward bacterial infections: identify the pathogen, prescribe an antibiotic to which it appears susceptible, and expect the infection to disappear. Yet for millions of patients, particularly women affected by recurrent UTIs, the reality is far more complicated. Bacteria can survive apparently appropriate antibiotic treatment, symptoms can return weeks or months later, and standard laboratory susceptibility tests often provide an incomplete picture of what is happening inside the bladder. A new study published in Nature Communications on 4 September 2026 offers a striking explanation for part of this discrepancy. Researchers from University College London, the University of Oxford, the University of Leicester and collaborating institutions have built a physiologically sophisticated human bladder microtissue system in which uropathogenic Escherichia coli can be studied under human urine and realistic fluid-flow conditions. The pla...

A bacteriophage infection is usually described as a sequence of molecular events: attachment, genome injection, takeover of bacterial metabolism, viral replication, assembly and finally cell lysis. But inside the infected bacterium, another process is unfolding at the same time. Viral and bacterial DNA are physically reorganizing in three dimensions. Figure: Model of PAK_P3 genome dynamics during infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Adapted/reproduced from Bignaud et al., Science Advances (2026), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aef2512, licensed under CC BY 4.0. A study published in Science Advances on 26 August 2026 now provides an unusually detailed view of this hidden choreography. Researchers from Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, Sorbonne Université, CNRS and the University of Oxford followed the virulent bacteriophage PAK_P3 during infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and reconstructed how both the viral genome and the bacterial chromosome change their spatial organization over the co...

Bacteriophages and bacteria are locked in one of biology’s oldest evolutionary conflicts. Bacteria continually acquire new immune systems capable of detecting, blocking or destroying invading viruses, while phages evolve countermeasures that allow them to regain access to their hosts. A new study published in Nature has now revealed an unusually aggressive strategy used by bacteriophage T7: rather than precisely disabling one bacterial defence at a time, the virus releases a kinase capable of modifying an extraordinary fraction of the proteins inside the infected cell. Illustration depicting how T7 kinase, a phage enzyme, modifies many proteins inside an infected bacterium, helping shut down its defence mechanisms. Credit: Daniela Velasco/EMBL The work, led by researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and collaborators, identifies the T7 protein kinase T7K, also known as gp0.7, as a remarkably broad anti-defence weapon. T7K has been known since the 1970s ...

Some of the most difficult bacterial infections are not defined solely by antibiotic resistance. Their persistence often depends on biofilms, highly organized microbial communities in which bacteria become embedded within an extracellular matrix and adopt physiological states that can make conventional antimicrobial treatment considerably less effective. Understanding whether bacteriophages and antimicrobial peptides can overcome this barrier is therefore becoming an important direction in the search for new strategies against antimicrobial-resistant infections. This question lies at the centre of the doctoral research of Laura Marsal Martinez at the University of Pisa. Marsal is part of METAMIC3, a European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network focused on microbiomes, metaproteomics and microbial effectors. Her project investigates the activity of bacteriophages and antimicrobial peptides against bacteria growing either freely in planktonic cultures or embedded within biofilms. The ...