In a study published in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers from the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center discovered a new way to identify strategies that bacteria use to defend against phages. The common way to identify antiphage defenses is to look at nearby genes, relying on the fact that defense-related genes are often clustered in the bacterial genome. Instead, Rodriguez-Rodriguez and colleagues extracted DNA from bacteria of different environments such as human fecal and soil samples, cleaved that DNA into small fragments of only three or four genes, and then inserted the DNA fragments into E. coli bacteria. By then growing the E. coli in petri dishes coated with phages that attack E. coli, the researchers were able to identify which bacterial colonies survived the phages, and thus which fragments held protective genes. From these functional assays, the team was able to identify over 200 putative defenses. To read more click here https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(25)00277-X