Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments: One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

⏰ Closing soon! We’re looking for a Research Scientist (Bioinformatics) to join the Laboratory of Dr Kai Cheng in our Food, Microbiome and Health programme 💷 £37,500 to £41,500 🗓️ Apply by 9 November 2025 ➡️ buff.ly/DqLnYek

Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

U.S. Biotech Future Is Now Made in China www.realclearworld.com/articles/202...

From genotype to phenotype with 1,086 near telomere-to-telomere yeast genomes www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/HaploTeam/10...

"WGS-informed prevention could hypothetically generate net savings of €1.35 million annually if transmission was stopped once a clonal isolate was detected in a second patient." I think that translates to ~1.5 million US dollars

🚨🔊 Fully funded PhD!! 🚨🔊 Are you interested in wildlife gut microbiomes? Love birds, fieldwork and bioinformatics? Want to join a collaborative and supportive team? Looking for training to become an independent scientist? Please apply! Informal enquiries welcome! www.uea.ac.uk/course/phd-d...

Interested in modelling metabolism from food -> gut microbiome -> blood ? 5 days left to apply for a fully funded position to investigate this. 👇👇👇

New blog post! metaMDBG (@gaetanbenoit.bsky.social) and Myloasm (@jimshaw.bsky.social) have had recent releases, so I updated the benchmarks from the Autocycler paper: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a... Both tools improved considerably! Time to update your conda environments 😄

If you are UK-based and working on any aspect of microbiomes (human, plant, insect, soil, animal, ...), please do sign up to Microbiome-Net for details of networking, funding and training opportunities. forms.office.com/pages/respon...

Come be our head of bioinformatics at @mrc-lms.bsky.social ! Our bioinformatics team are closely involved with lots of interesting science and we love working with them. Topics inc. development, cancer, metabolism, aging, TEs (my favourite of course 😜) #TEsky lms.mrc.ac.uk/work/vacanci...

Lib Dems: We have 12x Reform's MPs, can we have the same coverage? BBC: But Reform has 2x your poll rating. If there were an election tomorrow, they'd be running the country. Lib Dems: So you're putting their people and policies under scrutiny, right? BBC: Lib Dems: Right?

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀 • 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome) • 3–579× lower inconsistency • improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species github.com/mathjeff/map... bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma... #microsky

We want to explore the metabolic interactions among gut bacteria, when the human host eats different foods - maybe this explain partly the Enterosignature structure? Please do apply for our bioinformatic post to explore this question in metagenomes: jobs.quadram.ac.uk/Details.asp?...

The AI hype is so wild that we know see charts like this and think that "must have made by AI". Or are marketing teams worse than AI nowadays?

🧪 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: “Structure-based metabolite function prediction using graph neural networks”    Explore the full study here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf174 Authors include: @alisaadatv.bsky.social, @jannahastings.bsky.social

The right-wing press is going mad over votes at 16 ("a naked attempt to twist democracy in Labour’s favour", an "election-rigging move"...) Oddly, they said the same 100 years ago when the voting age for women fell from 30 to 21. Let's revisit the Mail's campaign to"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly"...

Happy Independence Day ⭐️

happy Transposon Day @yaasircheema.bsky.social and co :)

🆕 Blog! We hear from some of our researchers about their experience of attending the #Biofilms11 conference which brought together experts in biofilms 🦠 ➡️ buff.ly/rgQkywB @dr-bilal-djeghout.bsky.social @jcihorton.bsky.social ‬ @hoyuliu.bsky.sociall

⏰ Closing soon! We’re looking for a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer to join the Core Bioinformatics team and define the bioinformatics support behind the institute’s research into gut health, microbiology and food 🧬 💷 £44,500 to £55,000 🗓️ Apply by 19 May 2025 ➡️ buff.ly/qcolF3D

DeSciDe: A tool for unbiased literature searching and gene list cu-ration unveils a new role for the acidic patch mutation H2A E92K https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.652253v1

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Interesting: MIT's Boltz-1 is a fully open-source model for predicting complex protein structures. Unlike AlphaFold, which gives a single "best guess," MIT's Boltz-1 models the probability of different possible protein structures, capturing their natural flexibility. news.mit.edu/2024/researc...

Check out Wu et al.'s paper on MetaX, a peptide-centric platform. High-resolution insights into “who is doing what and how” in microbial ecosystems. ⚡️ Outperforms protein-centric tools 🔍 Reveals taxa-function links at peptide level. i.e. Deep dive in taxa-function pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

I got hit by some rather sudden and extreme financial hardship so if anyone is in need of remote wetlab contract research, strictly BSL1, do let me know. Currently scrambling for gigs. Plant, Bacterial, Archaeal Non-model Bioeng Custom Lab Hardware Turn Key Genetic Design Please repost for reach 💚

Small update from AllTheBacteria (allthebacteria.org). Assemblies can be bulk downloaded from OSF as before, or you can now get individual assemblies from AWS. We now also have a LexicMap index on AWS, so you can align your favourite gene against 2.4million bacteria (next post for price estimates)

AFESM: a metagenomic guide through the protein structure universe! We clustered 821M structures (AFDB&ESMatlas) into 5.12M groups; revealing biome-specific groups, only 1 new fold even after AlphaFold2 re-prediction & many novel domain combos. 🧵 🌐 afesm.foldseek.com 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Are you an experienced bioinformatician or computational biologist with a thorough understanding of current bioinformatics workflows and platforms? ☁️ Check out our current vacancy in our Core Bioinformatics team ⤵️ 💷 £44,500 to £55,000 🗓️ Apply by 19 May 2025 ➡️ buff.ly/EdytAeJ

A huge, new resource for plasmid research - PlasmidScope is a database of 852,000 #plasmid sequences with a rich set of annotations, automated online analysis and interactive visualisation academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

The UK car industry contributes £22bn to the economy and employs c 35k people. Universities contribute £265bn and employ nearly 400k, over 10x as much. Yet he seems ok to let that sector implode.

#EBAME 10 Microbial Ecogenomics Workshop! Brest🇫🇷, Oct 11-25, 2025. A two-week workshop of lectures & tutorials to learn about omics data analysis for microbial ecology and evolution, all in the beautiful Brest Bay! Apply here until June 1: maignienlab.gitlab.io/ebame

I was waiting two years to see this out!! The genomic location of bacterial genes is not random!!! Congratulation on the authors (Martin Lercher and Team!). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hello binfies 👋! There is an open position for a senior bioinformatician to join our fab **core bioinformatics** team at @quadraminstitute.bsky.social. jobs.quadram.ac.uk/Details.asp?...

Great new #microbiome research on #parkinson

Searching for SARPs can identify antimicrobial BGCs missed by conventional methods pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Interested in doing a sabbatical at EMBL, at one of its 6 sites in Barcelona, Cambridge, Grenoble, Hamburg, Heidelberg or Rome? Funding call with deadline 15 June, decisions in July. www.embl.org/about/info/s...

Liz Truss is still refusing to comment about her first day as an electrical engineer at Heathrow.

"There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside." - David Davis, 2016

🎓 #PhDPosition available in my group! 🫁 Understanding the microbiome and phageome in chronic lung infections for the development of phage therapy with me & Prof Eleanor Mishra 📅 Apply by Monday 14 April ➡️ buff.ly/7v9JVDU Happy to answer questions, but don't send your CV through email.

LLMs are great but not a substitute for the computer science foundations. As trainers, we need to embrace the change, and keep teaching about version control :)

🥁 We are happy to announce the release of a new version of curatedFoodMetagenomicData (cFMD) 🔗 Get it here: github.com/SegataLab/cFMD 🧵👇 1/5

We should compare Social Security, which has never missed a payment since its inception, to Tesla's stock price.

Did you know that next week is "Nextflow Training Week"? We have brand new material ✨ with the "Hello Nextflow" going live on the @nextflow.io YouTube channel, and a team waiting for all your questions on the Community Forum 💬 Find more details at nf-co.re/events/2025/... See you Monday!

🦘✂️ Thanks to @cziscience.bsky.social , @wytamma.bsky.social and I are writing the next version of the Snippy bacterial variant calling pipeline. We want your input on what features s it will have. Please fill out this (longish) survey to help make Snippy great again! forms.gle/YJP6WQjsk8KK...

nf-core/variantbenchmarking v1.0.0: Nextflow pipeline to evaluate and validate the accuracy of variant calling methods https://github.com/nf-core/variantbenchmarking 🧬🖥️🧪

A terrific core bioinformatics is looking forward to collaborating with you ⬇️