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The feasibility of Floquet engineering in graphene has been called into question due to its fast decoherence processes. Measurements of graphene’s photoemission spectrum now support the generation of Floquet states in this material.

Knockout collections provide a valuable tool to explore gene function, yet are expensive and technically challenging to produce at a genome-wide scale. Here Baym et al. devise a cost-effective transposon-based method to quickly develop a knockout collection for the electroactive microbe Shewanella oneidensis.

Strong light-matter interaction provides opportunities for engineering electronic symmetry on an ultrafast timescale by forming photon-dressed states called Floquet-Bloch states. Here, the authors observe parity manipulation of Floquet-Bloch states by light fields in a model semiconductor - black phosphorus.

Phylogenetic compression achieves performant and lossless compression of massive collections of microbial genomes, facilitating fast BLAST-like search and versatile alignment tasks.

The build-up and dephasing of Floquet-–Bloch bands is visualized in both subcycle band-structure videography and quantum theory, revealing the interplay of strong-field intraband and interband excitations in a non-equilibrium Floquet picture.

Some phages use plasmid-encoded conjugation proteins as receptors to infect their bacterial hosts, making their host range dependent on horizontal transfer of the plasmid. Here, the authors present a method for identification of new plasmid-dependent phages, and find that they are common and abundant in wastewater and their genetic diversity is largely unexplored.

Fluorescence-labelling strategies and a suite of imaging methods are used to characterize mycobacteriophage infection in single cells and populations.

The bacterial genotoxin colibactin triggers prophage-mediated lysis of neighbouring bacteria, a finding that provides insight into the dynamics of microbial communities and relationships between bacterial metabolite production and phage behaviour.

A study details the creation of an Escherichia coli genetically recoded organism that is resistant to viral infection, and describes a further modification that keeps the organism and its genetic information biocontained.

Beta-lactam antibiotics and beta-lactamase inhibitors compete for the same binding site on beta-lactamases; thus, mutations that increase beta-lactamase activity likely increase also susceptibility to the inhibitor. Here, Russ et al. identify rare mutations in the ampC beta-lactamase gene that escape this adaptive tradeoff specifically for certain drug combinations.

The chemical stability of DNA makes complete erasure of DNA-encoded data difficult. Here the authors mix true and false messages, differentiated by whether a truth marker oligo is bound to it, and show that brief exposure to elevated temperatures randomizes the binding of truth markers preventing data recovery.

Techniques for structural characterization and quantification of DNA origami are still poorly developed, despite advances in other aspects of DNA nanotechnology. Here, the authors combine barcoding and next generation sequencing to simultaneously image and quantify self-assembled DNA nanostructures.

Genomic neighbour typing can be used to infer the antimicrobial susceptibility and resistance of a bacterial sample based on the genomes of closest relatives. Combined with MinION sequencing, it can rapidly determine microbial resistance for clinical samples within 4 h.

Antibiotic resistance can evolve through the stepwise accumulation of mutations. Here, the authors reconstruct the multistep evolutionary pathway for trimethoprim resistance and show that epistatic interactions increase rather than decrease the accessibility of each adaptive peak.

Accurate understanding of the dynamics of correlated quantum many-body systems is of interest in many fields. Here the authors explain the exchange–correlation induced red-shift and incipient roton feature of the dynamic structure factor of the warm dense electron gas in terms of electronic pair alignment model.

A high-throughput screen against the E. coli tetracycline-resistance efflux pump TetA identifies two ‘selection-inverting’ compounds that swap tetracycline resistance for resistance to another antibiotic, paving the way for two-phase antibiotic treatment protocols.

Rowe, Salimijazi, Trutschel et al. screen a Shewanella oneidensis knockout library and identify genetic determinants of extracellular electron uptake, providing insight into mechanisms of electron transfer in this electroactive bacterium.

An engineered commensal E. coli strain can function as a living diagnostic for a marker of inflammation in the murine gut for 200 days.

Knockout Sudoku allows construction of whole-genome knockout collections for a wide range of microorganisms at a lower cost and increased speed, using combinatorial pooling, next-generation sequencing, and a Bayesian inference algorithm to process and annotate extremely large progenitor transposon insertion mutant collections.

Roy Kishony and colleagues sequenced the genomes of 112 Burkholderia dolosa isolates recovered from 14 individuals with cystic fibrosis as part of a retrospective study from a hospital epidemic monitored over the course of 16 years. They tracked recurrent mutations occurring in the bacterial isolates and found that 17 genes showed evidence of parallel adaptive evolution.