One such defence are "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats", or CRISPR, now better known for its applications in medicine and biotechnology. CRISPR systems in general act as ...

A red quarter of a circle with the words 'The Quarter Mark' beside it. A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they ...

When scientists discovered how bacteria protect themselves against viral invaders, called phages, in the early 2000s, little did they know they'd stumbled upon a revolutionary tool researchers could ...

Antibiotics usually save lives—but against some bacteria, they can make things worse. That’s the case with the Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli, where bacterial death releases a flood of a ...