The Polish Arctowski Station is situated in the maritime Antarctic on the western shore ot' Admiralty Bay and encompasses terrestrial habitats which are not perma-nently covered by ice, in contrast to morę than 90% of the island's surface area. Over the past several decades, stud-ies exploring the soils of those habitats have revealed a considerable diversity of bacteria, filamentous fungi, and, to a lesser extent, yeasts; however,...

Nanoarchaeum equitans is the only known representative of Archaea phylum Nanoarchaeota and stands out as one of the tiniest known living organism. What is more it has smallest genome, which is only 490.885 base pairs long. It is also one of the most compact genomes. According to predictions about 95% of the DNA encodes proteins or stable RNA. Nanoarchaeum equitans lacks genes for most vital metabolic pathways including lipid, cofactor,...

A Paenibacillus strain isolated in previous research exhibited antimicrobial activity against relevant human pathogens including Staphylococcus aureus and Listeria monocytogenes. In this study, the genome of the aforementioned strain, designated as MP1, was shotgun sequenced. The draft genome of strain MP1 was subject to multiple genomic analyses to taxonomically characterize it and identify the genes potentially responsible for...

CRISPR-Cas9 is a cutting-edge genome editing technology, which uses the endonuclease Cas9 to introduce mutations at desired sites of the genome. This revolutionary tool is promising to treat a myriad of human genetic diseases. Nevertheless, the molecular basis of DNA cleavage, which is a fundamental step for genome editing, has not been established. Here, quantum–classical molecular dynamics (MD) and free energy methods are used...