Our collaborative study with Joseph Bondy-Denomy (UCSF) and Daniel Swaney (UCSF / Gladstone Institutes) uncovers how jumbo bacteriophages build lipid-based compartments inside their bacterial hosts.

These phage “organelles” act as spatial control hubs that concentrate host and viral machinery to coordinate early infection events, a surprising strategy reminiscent of eukaryotic membrane remodeling.

This work, published in Cell Host & Microbe, highlights how phages can repurpose host membranes to protect their genomes and orchestrate replication within structured environments.

Read the full article: Characterization of a lipid-based jumbo phage compartment as a hub for early phage infection →