Excellent news:

Amazing example of influenza cheat/cooperator cycles in this recent paper - the repeatability of the oscillatory cycles is so striking Congrats to @alnajifg.bsky.social , @christopherbrooke.bsky.social , @vignuzzilab.bsky.social & friends www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧪 #socialviruses

"The hyperreal bat: more vivid, more coherent, and more narratively satisfying than any bat in nature." Why does the idea of bats as special viral reservoirs endure? New Substack post: robertjgifford.substack.com/p/bats-and-v...

Influenza remains an important cause of illness and death. In a phase 3 trial, a nucleoside-modified mRNA (modRNA) quadrivalent vaccine was found to be superior to a standard quadrivalent vaccine in preventing influenza illness. Full trial results: nej.md/43udoTG #MedSky #IDSky

It doesn’t matter how much you exercise or how many veggies you eat when it comes to a pandemic. These things will not stop it, and the shitbirds that Trump has installed in leading public health positions should be fired for even suggesting it would.

In Central America, scientists found a spike in malaria cases after the fungus arrived. As frogs died, there were fewer tadpoles to eat mosquito larvae; more mosquitoes resulted in a fivefold increase in malaria cases: wapo.st/3LHtdAj (gift). We allow extinctions at our peril. 🌎

Guess the news is officially out! Extremely excited to announce that I will be starting my own laboratory at Institut Pasteur @pasteur.fr this coming spring! Slight change to my office window view from Tokyo Tower🗼 to the Tour Eiffel. 🇫🇷

The deadly fever in Ethiopia has been identified as Marburg disease. It’s the first time a Marburg outbreak has been identified in Ethiopia. #IDsky 🧪 www.afro.who.int/countries/et...

Talking about RNA viruses escaping from labs in the scientific community is not controversial per se *when there is evidence of it* & the burden of proof is not that high.

Update on the wild #polio discovery in Germany: The virus was found in wastewater in Hamburg. @rki.de, the German public health agency, says the virus sequence is very similar to some isolated in Afghanistan, so the likely source was an infected human. (page 10 here: www.rki.de/DE/Aktuelles...)

I recently gave a talk at Cornell and sat down with Dr. Leifer for her "Immune" podcast. I really enjoyed our wide-ranging conversation, from how I got started in science, how immunity shapes evolution, pandemic risk, and, the current state of US science. 🎧👇 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My 1st first-author paper is out as a preprint! Excited to share the fascinating story of marine-feeding vampire bats 🌊🦇 We found that marine-diet bats were exposed to #H5#AvianFlu 🦠 from marine wildlife and could potentially spread it to livestock via blood feed🩸 doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.09.686930

New paper out on virus transmission in hospitals. Predictable patterns of airflow on hospital wards explained 3/4 of SARS-CoV-2 transmission events between patients. www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S019...

"SARS-CoV-2 is too well-adapted to humans [hence, insert your favorite conspiracy theory]". That was never right because, for one, SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic virus so it necessarily had to be "well-adapted". Now, a new study shows the same is true for BANAL-236 - a related virus isolated from bats.

Galbut (technically Galbūt) virus is Darren's discovery child named in Lithuanian (together with Chaq, a Klingon-named satellite of Galbūt) that turned out to be the most common RNA virus of Drosophila melanogaster. I'm loving the emerging "genomic epi, but like in insects" chapter of metagenomics!

Come join us - we are recruiting a postdoc in phylodynamics and epidemiological modelling to join an exciting project on foot-and-mouth-disease virus in African buffalo www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research... Please share widely! #jobs #disease #ecology #evolution #phylodynamics

🧪 🦠 Prefusion structure, evasion and neutralization of HSV-1 glycoprotein B www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you are looking for a PhD in the UK, please check out the LIDo program - www.lido-dtp.ac.uk/apply. If you are interested in viruses and making genetically edited salmon, please look up my icase project. International students are welcome to apply! Please reach out if you have questions.

New work published today from the RasgonLab! The first thesis chapter from @zureishon.bsky.social! Project highlights some of the difficulties we had with sample collection during the early days of COVID journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

Our new preprint is out 🥳🥳🥳 Henipaviruses, like Nipah and Hendra, package their genomes inside helical shells built by thousands of nucleoproteins. These nucleocapsids are essential to protect the viral RNA, but how do they ever let the polymerase in to read the sequence? 👇

Sad day for the folks who staked their reputations on lab leak conspiracy theories. www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...

Excited to announce the final version of the Mosquito Cell Atlas is out now in @cellpress.bsky.social!! 🦟🩸 There is SO much left to find & investigate in this dataset (& the rich biology of the Aedes aegypti mosquito)! We hope this helps scientists in many fields! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

As expected, unfortunately. If ever you needed a reason for never using GISAID ever again (as a data producer or data user - we're both), look no further. Time to move on to more trusted and transparent solutions.

Come join the Workshop on Phylogenomics in Cesky Krumlov, Czechia, from January 25 through February 7, 2026! Applications close November 15! #phylogenetics #evolution #genomics #ai evomics.org/apply-worksh...

My paper is out! Uncovering hundreds of exogenous and endogenous RNA viral RdRp sequences amongst uncharacterised sequences in public protein databases. doi.org/10.1093/ve/v... 💻🧬 1/5 🧵

Just to add - after the molecular clock anomaly of the 2014 Lomela EBOV outbreak in DRC I wondered if @arambaut.bsky.social & I got the West African/Makona EBOV epidemic root wrong. Very happy to see JT McCrone correct the record (or at least get closer to the truth).

Our paper on the phenomenon of persistence and latency in Ebola virus in an unobserved reservoir is finally out in preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interesting that there has been absolutely no communication with submitters/users of the system, and no statements from the scientific governance or compliance boards on what would seem to be a fairly significant change to GISAID data access policy and platform operations. gisaid.org/about-us/gov...

Evolutionary biologist @scs22.bsky.social has had a lot of success recently sequencing ancient RNA viruses from museum samples. This summer I had the chance to accompany him and a team of researchers to the Arctic where they hope that the permafrost might allow them to go further back in time. 🧪

And now NextStrain as well. Next up, will GISAID start charging open-source community tools to have access? That would completely shaft users who contributed to GISAID, where we never agreed to that and assumed GISAID would be good custodians of the data we contributed. They're not.

Tanja Stadler @tanjastadler.bsky.social @ethz.ch awarded prestigious #DoronPrize for pioneering work in computational evolution and public health. Big congrats, Tanja! > u.ethz.ch/IxSY8

Just published an interactive article about a magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which powers sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa: sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt It's also notoriously unintuitive so I'm hoping this article helps you build that intuition.

🚨🧪 Interested in primate genomics and GxE interactions? My lab is recruiting graduate students and postdocs to help start projects on primate gene regulation and immune evolution. Reach out if you would like to learn more, and please spread widely! #ScienceJobs

You heard it straight from Kennedy himself: Gold Standard Science is actually just data fabrication.

I'm excited to report that a species has been named after my son Ze Frank, "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to science communication, which have inspired curiosity, wonder, and deeper public engagement with the natural world"

Great story! (Although I think that this is a TE, not an endogenous retrovirus)

Invasive mosquito vector species detected in surveillance traps in United Kingdom

LRP8 is a receptor for tick-borne encephalitis virus www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share that our paper on the relationship between viral load and metagenomic outputs in wildlife samples is now published in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety! 🎉 Fantastic collaboration with a brilliant team. More info: 📖 tinyurl.com/ywb7tvjm

New exciting resource published!! The Viro3D paper is out, describing our comprehensive database of predicted virus protein structures! 💻🧬 Work with @ulad-litvin.bsky.social , @grovearmada.bsky.social , Alex Jack, @bljog.bsky.social , @davidlrobertson.bsky.social www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

EMBO Young Scientists Forum 2025 in Vilnius wrapped up today. Huge thanks to fellow organisers, volunteer teams, @itaiyanai.bsky.social for a wonderful Night Science workshop & all speakers & attendees. Here's fellow organiser Stephen Jones taking YSF attendee entertainment to the next level.

> be at conference > slide mentions human roseolovirus 6 beta > don't know what that is > ah, *technically* it's Roseolovirus humanbeta6b (in italics too) > googling says it's actually just good old human herpesvirus 6 Thanks, ICTV 👍👍👍 I see your "facilitating communication" is going real well.

My MSc student Indrė Blagnytė has a #preprint up on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social on influenza D virus: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Flu D was discovered back in 2011, mostly circulating in cattle. Despite lots of research, a comprehensive analysis of its phylogeography had been missing. 1/6

📢New preprint on the impact of dengue virus genetic diversity on inhibition by Wolbachia 🦟🦠🧬 Project led by Afeez Sodeinde, @emiliefinch.bsky.social, and @keli5734.bsky.social! ✨ Key findings in thread below 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨📝 New work via @thepandemicinst.bsky.social now preprinted! We took ~19000 sequences of avian influenza virus and trained machine learning models on >40000 genomic/proteomic features - the resulting ensemble can predict zoonotic potential with AUC=0.95. More below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@zachhensel.bsky.social and I have a new paper on the origin of SARS-CoV-2! 🧪 There are a lot of reviews on the topic already, so we tried to do something different: characterize "lab leak" scenarios, and directly address those on SARS-CoV-2's furin cleavage site.▫️1/9 doi.org/10.5802/crbi...

We just went through the submission process with a Lancet sub-journal for consideration of our latest preprint. Then we got to the "fees" page - more than $8,000. I'm not sure journals realize how squeezed ID funding is, but what I'm not going to spend eight grand of tax-payer money on is that.

Really excited to have been a small part of this work investigating sarbecovirus host range, receptor usage and antigenicity! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.03.673949v1

In new study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social, we provide near real-time data on human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza by measuring ~26,000 titers to >100 recent viral strains Data can inform vaccine selection & evolutionary/epidemiological modeling www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...