Jingchao Chen

The paper uses long-read sequencing to show that most gut phages are methylated, with many encoding their own methyltransferases, suggesting methylation helps phages evade host defenses.

The paper develops a method combining phage enrichment and long-read sequencing to recover more complete gut phage genomes from fecal samples, identifying a megabase phage and revealing hidden diversity.

This study shows that phages and plasmids increase prokaryotic genome size, while CRISPR reduces it, with CRISPR targeting phages more than plasmids.