A Staphylococcus phage recombination cassette that enables recombineering across distant bacteria

A Staphylococcus phage recombination cassette enables markerless recombineering in S. aureus in four days and supports recombination across phylogenetically distant bacteria.

• Why it matters: Recombineering is limited by host specificity, since each organism typically needs its own optimized recombinase system.
• What they did: The authors mined Staphylococcus genomes for phage recombination cassettes anchored by phage recombination genes, tested representatives in S. aureus, then built the most efficient into a single-plasmid tool.
• The result: The cassette encodes both nuclease inhibition and ssDNA-binding itself, and recombination was observed in Streptococcus pyogenes, Enterococcus faecium, Francisella novicida, and Escherichia coli.

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