Do you know ~60% of human SVs fall in ~1% of GRCh38? See our new preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.23057 and the companion blog post on how we started this project and longdust: lh3.github.io/2025/09/29/o.... Work with Alvin Qin

☔💦 Sun, Sep 21 A sublime summery 8 days it's been w/J pod inland Puget Sound. Especially wild their South Sound foray, their first in decades. Orcas reported this morn in Admiralty Inlet. Is it Js leaving? 📸 J pod Double spyhop! Taken from atop Tacoma Narrows Bridge. By Jolena Tagg 9/20. #psws

There's always something new to see. This absolutely wild little thing is the insect-egg slime mould (Leocarpus fragilis). Each fruiting body is about 1.5 mm long. Bob Orr Pond Trail, Caughey-Taylor Preserve (Nature Trust NB), near St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

Thrilled to share our two latest papers with the @tcostalab.bsky.social lab! In the first, we uncover a new mechanism of satellite transfer: cf-PICIs hijack tails from diverse phages to spread across species. @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

I love old Dicty papers. Look at this one (from 1987) depicting the morphological changes as Dicty slugs migrate. Apparently their heads (“tips”) bob up and down. Adorable

Are you looking for a lectureship in biochemistry, molecular genetics, or bioinformatics? Come and enjoy the greatest place for kayak fishing and a fun research+teaching career. *there are other fun things to do here too.

Kia ora Aotearoa, it’s so good to be back! ☕️

We organized this one: academic.oup.com/femsle/artic... in 2024. It is coming back in 2026 with 2 hubs in the US (Michigan and SoCal). It was a great experience

Groups of people self-organized in other locations. Some may have driven an hour to get to the other locations but it wasn't a cross-country plane ride. One person in each location was a point person to lead the activities in that locations. "Activities" were things like think-pair-shares, 🧵

So many important things are discussed at conferences. When international travel is dangerous & science is under threat & research funding is being slashed & we know how bad flying is for the climate & we have technology to make it happen, the fact that all conferences aren't hybrid is wild. 🧪

Apparently NZ’ers are just as obsessed with Costco’s NZ butter as the rest of us. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

And this population has definitely been overtaken by the so-called “wrinkly spreaders”. I don’t know about the more gnarled looking one, which I’ve seen more than once

First peek at our class evolution experiment this quarter — diverse Pseudomonas fluorescens colony morphologies in response to predation by amoebae.

A little joyful practice in Seattle (in common with New Zealand) is that riders shout out a thank you to the bus driver ☺️

The website for our EMBO workshop is live now. Don't miss this opportunity to join us in a meeting that aims gathering all experts working on multicellularity. We will welcome you in the nice Barcelona in October! @multicellgenome.bsky.social @prbb.org @embo.org meetings.embo.org/event/25-mul...

Wolf’s milk slime mold, Discovery Park, Seattle. Kid made me SO proud… (1/4)

So, how much is everyone being charged for IDT custom oligos these days? I got a fresh quote for 2X what I paid a few months ago in NZ, and 4X what I paid at the Univ of Houston. (At UH, we also got free shipping.)

Also wondering if people have maybe used flatbed scanners? I do need to ensure a consistent distance to the plate, as we need to compare sizes of plaques across different plates

#MicroSky can anyone recommend a *low-tech* method to take images of agar plates with good contrast and little glare? My undergrads need to measure the sizes of amoebae plaques in bacterial lawns.

In my experience, we have not explicitly valued these skills and competencies in the larger scientific community and we may want to think about and discuss what valuing them would look like, for example during training.

I'm delighted to share a useful FREE web-based app portal of powerful bioinformatics tools for microbial genomes and shotgun microbiome sequences! It's called Micromics and is built by Middle Author Bioinformatics, led by co-founder @ironark.bsky.social omix.midauthorbio.com

DOGE’s the place and then leaves 🙄. Entirely predictable. www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3606...

Oh wow! When we moved back to US, youngest mourned that US didn’t have Te Reo Māori and netball 🥲. Maybe she’ll want to go to Yale 🙂 www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu...

View from my run today. Admittedly, it’s heavily zoomed and cropped. But it is WILD how you can be someplace many times and have no idea there’s a giant volcano lurking in the background #MountRainier #Tahoma

Bare bones dashboard is up... (Including the first Advisory Council meeting posted in the Federal Register) jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...

#SeattleLife - FB marketplace items I want to buy, only to realise seller is on some island I have no idea how to get to 🤨

Any recommendations for an ultralow freezer, #MicroSky? I seem to recall there was a brand to avoid at all costs. In the past, I had a Panasonic which was great, but not sure they are still being made. TIA!

NSF plans to reinstate all probationary employees who were fired on 18 Feb! NSF’s decision. 👏🏻👏🏻❤️

Excellent piece also highlights our EvolvingSTEM program that benefits thousands of grade 6-12 students annually in Pittsburgh. The NIH SEPA program that supports us has been archived. Stand up and speak out!

Kid is at it again: making unsolicited presentations #FutureProfessor

Apparently Seattlites also thank the bus driver ☺️

Local traditional media still works! We shot this interview on the grounds of the former J&L steel mill, where buildings including my lab are today. The threat to biomedical research in Pittsburgh is on par with the threat to the mills 50 years ago. www.wtae.com/article/pitt...

With national events moving fast and in a threatening direction, we’re beyond the range of experience of any living person. A primer for scientists (and everyone) on why it’s not just politics - and seven ways to act, locally: samwang.substack.com/p/an-action-...

Legitmately thrilled to share our latest work, in which @fernpizza.bsky.social solved an experimental challenge in plasmid biology as old as the field: measuring how plasmids compete and evolve within individual cells!

"This feels like the early days of the pandemic, except there's less I can do about it", a colleague told me yesterday. Yep. One thing you *can* do is outreach. My sense is that the majority of the country doesn't yet understand the scale or the stakes of what is happening. We have to tell them:

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠 sciencehomecoming.com

First coffee I’ve had in the US that tastes good to me. And strangely not in Seattle — ESP coffee, Alexandria VA

Think of a polygenic score you care about. Are direct genetic effects driving variation among people in this predictor? Or perhaps other, confounding factors? We at the @arbelharpak.bsky.social & @docedge.bsky.social Labs developed a method to tackle this question. [1/n]

Is it just me or did Justin Trudeau just make a case to the American people that our own opposition can’t seem to? 👊

Wow, just logged into Google Photos for the first time in years and happened on this photo from Maungawhau / Mt Eden, one of my old haunts. What a beauty 🥲

Well, this simplifies the task of exploring Seattle 😯

Good editors are a godsend. Whenever I get edits that clarify and sharpen the things I'm writing, I always have this feeling: www.youtube.com/watch?v=218i...

well it's a bit improvisational but I will try to write it down: 1. cook a couple of yellow onions in oil, diced 2. add 1kg or so of ground beef. you want it to not be too lean or else you'll need to add fat 3. spice this heavily

Why we fund basic research

Billie Eilish on NPR's Tiny Desk, holy moly she's good, even totally acoustic and exposed youtu.be/fOAIrUZbOwo?...

Accurate.

My Tidyverse local synteny visualizer is up on GitHub: github.com/cxli233/Tidy... GitHub page contains 2 example datasets, as well as step-by-step instruction & explanations on how it works. Details on required input data are discussed in the GitHub page. Let me know if you run into issues.

Only a microbiologist rummages through her purse and …. pulls out an electroporation cuvette