Back

Bridge recombinase enables versatile rewriting of bacterial genomes

Patel, J.; Swartz, S. E.; Oromi-Bosch, A.; Yong, L.; LaTurner, Z. W.; Demaray, J. E.; Voelker, A.; Ono, R.; Vu, P.; Rao, P.; Luskin, H.; Andrade, P.; Cui, M. L.; Mchedlishvili, G.; Hayes, M. M.; Aluwihare, N.; Iglesias-Aguirre, C. E.; MacKenzie, E. C.; Rodriguez, C. I.; Devkota, S.; Diamond, S.; Cress, B. F.

2026-04-29 synthetic biology
10.64898/2026.04.29.721476 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Bacteria drive crucial processes across ecosystems and profoundly impact human health, yet tools to rewrite microbiomes remain limited. Here, we show that bridge recombinase enables versatile and programmable genome editing across the bacterial tree of life. In Escherichia coli, we achieved 142 kb insertions at >90% efficiency, megabase-scale inversions (2.3 Mb), and pathway-scale 50 kb excisions. With a single ortholog and bridge RNA (bRNA), we edited bacterial isolates spanning five phyla and performed metagenomic editing in human gut microbiomes. We overcame cross-reactivity between co-expressed bRNAs to establish single-step search-and-replace editing, and demonstrated capture and interphylum transfer of functional chromosomal pathways, enabling programmable horizontal gene transfer. These advances establish bridge recombinase as a foundation for orchestrating controlled gene flow in complex microbial ecosystems.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.