In this Review, Pinto and Bhatt provide an overview of DNA-sequencing and RNA-sequencing approaches that can be used to study the composition, structure, and function of microbiomes and discuss the biological insights they provide.

In this Review, Pamula and Lehmann describe how distinct membraneless germ granules organize the germ cell cytoplasm at different stages of the germline life cycle to determine germ cell identity, maintain genome integrity and regulate gamete differentiation.

In this Review, the authors summarize DNA packaging in bacteriophage, bacteria and eukaryotic cells. They describe the difficulties each system faces when packaging its DNA, outline the molecular motor components involved, and provide insights from new studies that reveal how DNA organization is achieved.

Filtering genomic data is a crucial step to ensure the quality and reliability of downstream analyses. The authors provide guidance on the choice of filtering strategies and thresholds, including filters that remove sequencing bases or reads, variants, loci, genotypes or individuals from genomic datasets to improve accuracy and reproducibility.