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Some bacteria release colicins to kill competitors by carefully timing lysis for part of their population at a time. But group B colicins don't come with lysis genes, so how do cells safely release them? Stefanie Spriewald (LMU Munich, Germany) and colleagues published a new paper in MBio showing that colicin release in Salmonella has cleverly evolved to make use of prophage-mediated lysis, which already optimizes for not killing the whole population at once, leading to a stable system of phage-colicin interplay.