new reference genomes for Plasmodium ovale wallikeri and Plasmodium malariae (& Pf too) direct from blood taken from children carrying these parasites -- this was done with as little as 2 ng of DNA. all sorts of craziness going on in the subtelomeric regions ...

Preprints of pandemic potential - new historical piece from me on the history of bioRxiv/medRxiv, their role in the pandemic, and the way forward. 1/n journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Don’t forget that the 1961 triplet code paper only became elegant when it was written! The experiments were all a bit of a mess... I suspect the same was true of the other classic papers!

Open Senior Bioinformatician position at @sangerinstitute.bsky.social Tree of Life, to work on the Biodiversity Cell Atlas initiative with @marakat.bsky.social and me. 📅 Apply by January 18 🔗 sanger.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Wellco... Please share with anyone who might be interested!

Join our Tree of Life Programme as a Group Leader in Biodiversity Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Lead ambitious, large-scale genomics research to understand life’s diversity on Earth. 🔗 Learn more and apply: sanger.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Wellco... 📅 Closing date: 8 February 2026

🧐 Looking for a #PhD? University of Glasgow @glasgow.ac.uk @sbohvm.gla.ac.uk is offering two fully funded PhD positions within the new VectorGrid-Africa network!🦟 More details: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl... 📆Application deadline: 12 January 2026.

Are you excited about pangenomics? If so, join us in Edinburgh on 8-9th June to discuss the latest methods & insights from using these approaches across biodiversity! More details here: royalsociety.org/science-even... Organised together with @henrylnorth.bsky.social & @joanameier.bsky.social!

Tired of 3D7? Need real P. falciparum genomes from real infections? We’ve got you: 43 PacBio HiFi–assembled genomes from The Gambia, with full var/rifin/stevor repertoires in all their wild diversity. Data now public! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

a life changing opportunity made possible by the Nobel Prize funds awarded to John Sulston -- the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social runs the Sanger Prize scheme, open to an undergrad from any LMIC to spend 3 months here learning all about genomics. more details here www.sanger.ac.uk/about/study/...

Open postdoc position at @sangerinstitute.bsky.social Tree of Life to contribute to the Biodiversity Cell Atlas, with a focus on spatial transcriptomics. Apply by January 4 sanger.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/Wellco... Please share with anyone who might be interested!

please share this postdoc job alert! come join the budding Biodiversity Cell Atlas initiative as a postdoc or senior postdoc at @sangerinstitute.bsky.social working closely with @arnausebe.bsky.social and me to make progress on what we cover in this paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...

a life changing opportunity made possible by the Nobel Prize funds awarded to John Sulston -- the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social runs the Sanger Prize scheme, open to an undergrad from any LMIC to spend 3 months here learning all about genomics. more details here www.sanger.ac.uk/about/study/...

final week to apply for @sangerinstitute.bsky.social PhD programme (due Nov 27th) -- free to apply, open to anyone anywhere, and a superb training opportunity for students interested in genomic approaches applied to biodiversity, pathogens, vectors, and of course us pesky humans.

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities? Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation. 🧵(1/n) @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

#Microsporidia are #parasites of growing importance. @amjadkhalaf.bsky.social @mblaxter.bsky.social @marakat.bsky.social &co present 40 new genomes from #DarwinTreeofLife sequencing of their arthropod hosts, revealing insights into #tetraploidy & #reproduction @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/48HsAQJ

new publication by @amjadkhalaf.bsky.social who mined arthropod reference genome data for hidden microsporidia reads and then did a whole lot of assembling and sleuthing! great job @amjadkhalaf.bsky.social !

The fight against #malaria is at a crossroads. Together with colleagues worldwide, I’ve signed an Open Letter urging #IUCN members to keep the door open to responsible research and new tools that could help reverse stalled progress and save lives. Add your voice here scienceforbiodiversity.org

Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new... Mosquitoes that have been in the collection for nearly a hundred years are helping us in dealing with an even older but also current problem - malaria @sangerinstitute.bsky.social @nhm-london.bsky.social

One of the most dangerous malaria-carrying mosquitoes is rapidly evolving in response to control efforts, genetics has revealed. Findings could inform smarter tools to monitor for and fight malaria. 🦟 Read more here ⤵️ http://bit.ly/4pwQKDv

Our paper Genomic diversity of the African malaria vector Anopheles funestus was published in Science today! It features inversions, selection in action, museum specimens and putative new ecotypes. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

How many chromosomes can an animal have? In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact. www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚀🧬🔥 Hot off the press — 2025! Don’t miss this must-read publication: bit.ly/4mJwFb7 This groundbreaking paper sets the stage for Earth BioGenome Project Phase II — where EBP is gearing up to scale genome sequencing 10× faster than ever before! 🌍✨

Malaria cases surge in Zimbabwe largely due to abrupt cut in USAID that affected mosquito net provision and surveillance measures. The Zimbabwean government trying to step up but can’t make up for the damage the sudden cessation. Climate change further increases mosquito burden too

Postdoc position opening in my group! Research projects: pangenomes for diverse organisms, genome evolution, biocomputing, language models. Please reach out if interested!

new from the lab -- we investigate 100% ethanol, DMSO salt solution (DESS), EDTA, RNAlater, and AllProtect as possible approaches for short term room temperature preservation of mosquito HMW DNA, nuclei for Hi-C, and RNA towards high quality reference genome creation. the key findings/tips are ....

new from the lab -- we investigate 100% ethanol, DMSO salt solution (DESS), EDTA, RNAlater, and AllProtect as possible approaches for short term room temperature preservation of mosquito HMW DNA, nuclei for Hi-C, and RNA towards high quality reference genome creation. the key findings/tips are ....

several years ago, the @ebpgenome.bsky.social sample collection and processing subcommittee ran a survey to understand more about people's successes and failures with HMW DNA extractions across the tree of life -- we planned to publish the results of this survey alongside the randomly drawn ...

Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA research funding call is now open - great for getting new collaborations started www.cambridge-africa.cam.ac.uk

Researcher Amita Gupta has spent more than a decade planning and running a $70-million trial to study a new tuberculosis drug, enrolling ~6,000 participants in 13 countries. It might all have been for nothing. That's because a new NIH policy has abruptly cut off billions to trials abroad. 🧪

New preprint! We generate 40 new high-quality microsporidian genomes from infected arthropod hosts that were sequenced to create reference genomes by the Darwin Tree of Life project. 8 of our genomes are chromosome-level, and we’re able to generate Hi-C data for 7! 🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

a bit of light in dark times for infectious disease research and ultimately control www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/articl...

if you are trying to get HMW DNA out of any species, have a look at the stellar progress from Sanger Tree of Life core lab who have now extracted DNA from 1000s of species. Paper showcasing things learned along the way now up on bioRxiv at www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

propose reference genomes that you can supply tissue for for any mosquito species here tinyurl.com/MosquitoReferenceGenomes

Next up is Miguel Garcia-Knight, head of @levelab.bsky.social at UNAM 🇲🇽, and he's telling us about adaptive #antiviral immunity and viral vector #ecology @sangerinstitute.bsky.social #IFR2025

speaking of new mosquito reference genomes, here is a new one for Culex pipiens pipiens wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/10-...

1 ng for up to 3 Gb genome!

please take this survey if you use Darwin Tree of Life genomes! we are really keen to understand impact of these genomes on your science and wider work. Thank you!

globally, there are ~3500 described mosquito species in the Culicidae family and many of these are important vectors of disease but only a small percentage have genomic resources. we are launching a pilot project to generate high quality reference genomes for 100 important mosquito species [1/3]

The pointless destruction of the scientific and medical research system open.substack.com/pub/stevensa...

Check out our new preprint describing CiFi - a method that couples 3C and PacBio HiFi sequencing with low input requirements. We apply it to human GM12878 to better characterize chromatin across repetitive regions, as well as single insect samples (a mosquito and a Mediterranean fruit fly).

looking to find folks who have current access to identified specimens (can be live or dead and well preserved) of many mosquito species. there are 3500ish described Culidae out there - anyone know anyone who might have specimens from 50+ species? please get in touch if so!

The collections at @nhm-london.bsky.social are invaluable for science Anopheles funestus collected from Kenya, Uganda & Tanzania in the 1930's were sequenced for this project on genomic diversity & evolutionary history. 1was even from 1927 Read this clever thread on a hugely collaborative project

very proud of this work -- if you are into malaria or popgen or evolutionary biology or genomics, have a read. and congratulations to the whole team behind this progress to understanding of malaria mosquito genomic diversity and population structure!

Mosquitoes: the photo gallery. I feel better about posting this in the off-season, for some reason (*scratches*)

Darwin Tree of Life Barcoding Wrapped presented at DTOL celebration today — a lot of specimens and a lot of barcodes!!

and as a perk, we got to see Darwin’s pet tortoise and the pickled grey squirrel that is the specimen used for the Darwin Tree of Life Sciurus carolinensis genome

Applications open for several research positions here in Cambridge including evolutionary genetics, genomics and population genetics. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/49389/

Great peer group, a long list of outstanding graduates, no fees, good stipend - we are very proud of the programme.