Registration is open for the 2026 Summer Institutes in Global Health, with 19 courses that tackle today’s most pressing global health challenges. Join a global, interdisciplinary community that bridges research policy and practice. For more information: www.mcgill.ca/summerinstit....

Working on a story for Science about cuts to Canada's government researchers and labs. If you are affected by this please reach out (either on here or via my website). Anonymity is an option. 🧪

Our article on the dark matter in the #phyllosphere in Systematic and applied Microbiology! #methylobacterium #lichenibacterium #lichenifustis #lichenihabitans and even more to discover in #Hyphomicrobiales (former Rhizobiales) inhabiting leave surfaces! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Log bike

Most of the world doesn’t require a prescription for oral contraceptives. Why do Canadians still need one? Newer pills are safer — but Canada's health system still requires doctors to sign off. www.cbc.ca/news/health/... via @cbcnews.ca

Now out & nicely formatted in @isme-microbes.bsky.social A big analysis of ocean genomes & metagenomes co-led by former postdocs, now PIs, @gmdouglas.bsky.social & @cyanophage.bsky.social along with co-PIs @lbobay.bsky.social & Samuel Chaffron. A few highlights... 🧵 (1/n) doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Too add one more layer of cause to this fine piece, every time I tell my friends in the rest of the country that the total fees for my three kids playing minor hockey in Montreal came to less than $1,500, they fall out of their chairs. +

www.growkudos.com/publications... New work with @ckarakoc.bsky.social and @shoestrapped.bsky.social in @pnas.org

Reminder that it’s sometimes worth clicking the link in a cryptic email from Workday because maybe you have been promoted to Professor and didn’t realize till a week later…

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our paper, led by @martibartfast.bsky.social a) correcting errors in 4.5 million genomes & their phylogeny b) improving representation of the Global South in public data www.nature.com/articles/s41... (thread 1/n)

How do bacterial pangenomes evolve, what controls their dynamics, why do they exist? Fitting a mechanistic model to 450 species from allthebacteria.org suggesting fast vs slow gene exchange (i.e. amount of MGEs) is a major differentiating factor, correlated with phylogeny rather than lifestyle

Olympic hockey on the big screen and soup simmering in the kitchen.

New preprint from our big collaborative evolution experiment in 9 whole lakes in Alaska, written by McGill grad student @lucaseckert.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... What happens if you put a mixture of multiple source populations together to complete & evolve in multiple new lakes?

Excellent classification. xkcd.com/3204/

This is the final week to submit your abstract to the Canadian Bioinformatics Hub Conference 2026 | #ActNow #Bioinformatics #OpenScience #Toronto #Canada #GreatScience 🧬 🖥️ 🧪 🔓 ⬇️ www.iscb.org/cbhc2026/

Montreal in February: we eat so much poutine that our dumpsters are overflowing with 180L vats of poutine sauce. This message brought to you by Tourisme Montréal

How does population density affect evolutionary trajectory? Microbes construct their own niche which in turn reshapes their evolution. Preprint drop from grad student @noahhoupt.bsky.social whose evolution experiments featured blue/white colonies, 1000 generations, a lab move, and much more!

Hey y’all, New paper out from the lab in Microbial Genomics, starting down the rabbit hole of IS elements in Paeudomonas syringae www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

How your email finds me today

Rereading these two papers: Holes in the hologenome: why host-microbe symbioses are not holobionts. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... The Hologenome Concept: Helpful or Hollow? journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... And I still find myself in general agreement with most of the points in them

Anti-ICE demonstration being held in downtown Montreal Sunday montrealgazette.com/news/local-n...

People always say, “oh, but what if ‘zero tolerance for sex pests’ gets earth’s rare geniuses fired?!?” as though many of these manipulative creeps haven’t also manipulated their way into professional positions far above their skill level…

Tonight’s film selection

Calling all OrthoFinder users! We’ve just released GLADE, a tool to infer gene gains, losses, duplications, and ancestral genomes across a phylogeny. GLADE runs directly on OrthoFinder results. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... github.com/lauriebelch/... (1/10)

ONT Axes P2 Solo, Roiling Community 🧬🖥️ omicsomics.blogspot.com/2026/01/ont-...

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

The names of 72 female scientists will be added to the Eiffel Tower, to accompany those of 72 male scientists that are already engraved there tinyurl.com/e2satnyp 👏👩‍🔬 🧪

Locutus movie pick: The Breakfast Club. Five unique individuals discover that they are essentially the same and can be used as interchangeable components of a collective.

I was maybe 2.5 years into my position as an Assistant Professor when my phone rang, and it was Kirsty Duncan, the new federal science minister, calling out of the blue. I had never met her. She asked me what she could do for early career investigators. /1

Made a drawing to explain what a soft sweep is (and a hard sweep) in the context of drug resistance evolution in a viral population within a person's body. Anyone teaching about selective sweeps? Feel free to use. #populationgenetics #HIV #drugresistance #evolution #PopulationGenomics

Vaughn Cooper’s new Scientific American article offers a clear look at the potential threats posed by mirror‑life. He trained with MGI's Rich Lenski @relenski.bsky.social, whose contributions to the field are referenced in the piece. Important context for a complex topic.

Thread!

Excited to see this published! A big part of why SAR11 is so tricky to grow like "normal" microbes.

Cool study showing in exquisite details what every parent of kids in daycare already knows...

Sad to hear that Oxford Nanopore wants to discontinue the P2Solo later this year in favor of the P2i (the very pricey P2Solo that comes with a GPU to do the basecalling in it) It feels like such a big step in the wrong direction. They are a great sequencing company, not a great GPU upseller...

We just released #anvio v9, "eunice" 🎉 This version represents over 2,000 changes in the codebase since v8, increasing the total number of programs in the anvi'o ecosystem to 176. Read the release notes: github.com/merenlab/anv... Visit our up-to-date web page: anvio.org

God bless the United States of Minnesota

Another way in which Denmark is helping the US!

Call for abstracts ENDS MONDAY!! details below :)

Montreal’s snow removal operation — snow is trucked away from streets to snow dumps — is really effective. But also *expensive*. Each centimetre collected across the city costs $1 million. An operation collecting 15 cm of snow costs $15 million. The city does it about half a dozen times a year.

very sad news. Peer Bork was one of the leaders of our field, a wonderful scientist, and he's much too young to be gone. www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

🚨4-year fully funded PhD in the lab of @magicmicrobe.bsky.social (& collaborating with me!): How does iron availability shape the ability of pathogens to invade the gut microbiome? Apply by Jan 26th Advert: research.reading.ac.uk/foodbiosyste... How to apply: research.reading.ac.uk/foodbiosyste...

Trying to keep these vibes in my heart and mind as I digest (yet another!) rejected grant.

First lab lunch of 2026! There’s not a lot to love about the year so far but getting to hang out with this cool gang on a daily basis keeps me going.

Peer Review is broken because a generation of Editors were trained that peer review is sacrosanct. Thus we have Editors who are clerks, sending and re-sending manuscripts to reviewers until they are happy. That's not the job. Be an Editor, not a clerk. Use your skill and judgement. Make decisions.

Our new paper on BON in a Box is out! 📦 This project has high ambitions: linking biodiversity science to meaningful policy, transforming messy data into useful metrics. 🐝 🌳 📊 💡 Our vision is to make biodiversity science more user friendly, powerful and accessible! academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Viruses transform microbes, populations, & ecosystems. In new work jointly led w/@tn-marine-micro.bsky.social + more, we find a link between enhanced viral infection and productivity 50 meters below the surface in the otherwise nutrient limited Sargasso Sea. a 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Locutus safety tip: To prevent identity theft, avoid having your own identity.