Science Daily  October 21, 2021 Although it is generally accepted that phages drive bacterial evolution, how these dynamics play out in the wild remains poorly understood. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Vienna, France) found that susceptibility to viral killing in marine Vibrio is mediated by large and highly diverse mobile genetic elements. These phage defense elements display exceedingly fast evolutionary turnover, resulting in differential phage susceptibility among clonal bacterial strains while phage receptors remain invariant. Protection is cumulative, and a single bacterial genome can harbor 6 to 12 defense elements, accounting for more than 90% of the […]