📢Join us for the next ECR #Viromics Webinar "How viral evolution is shaped during long-term infections of immune-compromised hosts" ‍🎙️Jonas Fuchs, University Hospital Freiburg, Germany 🗓️11 Feb 2026, 4 PM CET 📍Online/Zoom (register for login details) 👉 evbc.uni-jena.de/events/ecr-v...

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Really excited our paper about how H5N1 rapidly adapted to cattle (and how these adaptations also increased its ability to infect cells from the human respiratory tract) is now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper on the Genomic Epidemiology of DENV2/3 in Colombia and the Americas is finally out @cp-cellreports.bsky.social, check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Big thanks to my collaborators @lambod50.bsky.social, @viralverity.bsky.social, @nathangrubaugh.bsky.social, and many others!

Global solidarity in genomic surveillance improves early detection of acute respiratory virus threats. "Importantly, these benefits cannot be attained by siloed expansion in countries that already possess strong capacity." Well done to the team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Terrific origin story, history, and future of bioRxiv and medRxiv by @richardsever.bsky.social in @mbio.bsky.social journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

✨Africa CDC shuts down RFK's attempt to conduct a Tuskegee-like vaccine trial on children in Guinea-Bissau. The study exploited “the scarcity of a proven beneficial vaccine in a context where that vaccine is needed,” said Boghuma Titanji. @melodyschreiber.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Remember? RNA virus journal club is already this Thursday! 🤩 Join us and join our (RdRp summit) slack (link in the comment): calendar.app.google/K2fwcsL78K1E... RNA Virus Journal ClubJoin Zoom Meeting us02web.zoom.us/j/8109697228... Meeting ID: 810 9697 2281 Passcode: 174610

Come join my group as a postdoc on a fun wildepi.ca project looking at the evolution of endemic alpha- and betacoronaviruses in Canadian wildlife. Computational work will inform concurrent experimental work in the @banerjeelab.ca and @smubareka.bsky.social groups! bioinformatics.ca/jobs/postdoc...

Very much looking forward to my fireside chat with @syramadad.bsky.social next Thursday at 1pm PST at the Belfer Center @harvardkennedy.bsky.social on "Genomic Surveillance & Pathogen Data Sharing: A New Era for Scientific Diplomacy". Virtual, so come join us! harvard.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Check out our new print that combines dense sequencing and phylodynamics to uncover a bunch of 😎 things about an understudied virus. - Doesn't evolve for 10 months a year ✅ - Uses some mossies for maintenance, others for spread ✅ - Established in Northeast for ~300 years ✅

🦟📄 New preprint! Our first large-scale phylodynamic study of Jamestown Canyon virus (JCV) reveals how mosquito ecology shapes the evolution, persistence, and spread of this understudied arbovirus in North America. Read it here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am very glad to share the preprint for our latest study on the 2024-2025 chikungunya virus outbreak on Réunion island, with primary data produced thanks to the massive efforts performed by Marie-C Jaffar and Etienne Frumence and analyses led by Simon Dellicour. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

'But what if IAVs could use a different receptor? Our previous work revealed that the IAV subtypes H17N10 and H18N11, which have so far been detected exclusively in bats, use MHC-II molecules as entry receptors instead of the conventional sialic acid receptors'

We've a computational PhD project available AI-DRIVEN DISCOVERY OF VIRUS–HOST MOLECULAR INTERACTIONS www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl... as part of the University of Glasgow's MVLS Futures Themes PhD Programme. Deadline for applications is this Monday, 12th Jan 2026. Please apply!

I wrote about this claim forever ago when he made it on Joe Rogan's show:

This isn't in international media yet but Lithuania is in crisis. The ruling coalition is trying to seize control of our public broadcaster LRT using expedited parliamentary procedures. European & Venice Commissions are aware & we've been protesting for the last two weeks. Things are looking grim.

I rarely ask for things, but I will make an exception for my colleague and friend, Augustine Goba, who dedicated his life to saving others. Augustine was Director of the hemorrhagic fever lab in Kenema, Salone, and is struggling with PSP. Please consider donating. www.gofundme.com/f/augustine-...

François Blanquart et al. dive into the genetic basis of HIV virulence with very cool statistical methods. They show that viral load is shaped by host-dependent HLA escape variants with large effects, alongside many additional variants whose effects are too subtle to reach genome-wide significance.

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.