Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

Good luck with your new adventure!

I had to triplecheck this because I didn't believe it... All of the world's discovered reserves of fossil fuels = the same energy as just 5 days of sunlight hitting the Earth🤯 Solar power is basically unlimited🤷‍♂️

Proud of the work in this new preprint from my postdoctoral research. We used experimental evolution of mutualistically cross-feeding yeast to test how generalized interactions alter benefit evolution and opportunities for coevolution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1....

Delighted to see the first version of our new ELife paper. A collaboration with Levi Morran, we show how an intact antibiotic resistance gene (mecA) changes the course of S. aureus evolution on a new host. Kudos to Michelle Su and Kim Hoang for making this happen. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

“Well I don’t like that study because it doesn't give me the result I want’

During the day yesterday in California, >75%of all electricity was produced by renewable #energy, including solar. After the sun went down, half of all electricity STILL came from renewables, including wind batteries, hydro, geothermal, etc.

A BLAST update adding support for compressed files and csv output with headers is a Good Friday night surprise! blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-ne...

In under 24h following the newly identified outbreak of #Ebola in the DRC, the virus has been isolated, sequenced and the virus sequence data made publicly available. virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

Ok this is mad "...an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wow, more than 2.4M of assembled bacteria in the new release of ABT! We plan to index these using our efficient colored De Bruijn graph index, Fulgor. We recently conducted experiments with nearly 1M genomes…getting there :) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The data shows that the future will be electric & renewable ... 🧪🔌💡☀️💨🌊🔋 The global energy transition is underway. And that is good for #Climate #Environment #PublicHealth #Economics interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/so...

Fantastic news - congratulations!

Bactopia update! Bactopia is now compatible with @nextflow.io v25 syntax and the plugin (github.com/bactopia/nf-...) is converted to the latest structure. I'm hoping to have a development build soon. If you're interested in testing please let me know here or at github.com/bactopia/bac...

The "data" package Secretary Kennedy used to bolster his argument for discontinuing #BARDA funding for #mRNA research doesn't support his argument. @jakescottmd.bsky.social lays it out in a must read for @statnews.com. www.statnews.com/2025/08/13/r...

Excited to share new #program, STEPS, which can simulate #dynamics of the E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment (#LTEE) or other microbes in serial transfer regime. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/s... STEPS developed by @devinmlake.bsky.social, Zachary Matson, Minako Izutsu, and me.

Howdy! I'm currently writing up version 4 of Bactopia! Similar to previous major versions, I've started an issue on Github to track v4 progress. If you are a user of Bactopia and would like to help with feedback or with code, check out the following link: github.com/bactopia/bac...

To say that "the data show these vaccines fail" in regards to the mRNA plaform is unforgivable. For those of you that don't remember - this is the data from a SINGLE dose. In December 2020. So good I cried in grateful tears.

“Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.” City engineer credits lower speed limits and smart design. I agree. #Helsinki #VisionZero

Carl Sagan explains how the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round and calculated its circumference over 2,000 years ago.

The preprint of my first article is available on bioRxiv! We use a transposon ecology framework to analyze the distribution of insertion sequences within prokaryotic genomes. We characterize their ecological niche and show evidence of niche construction 🧪🧬💻 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

PO just confirmed that our 5th percentile R01 is not getting funded. Past NCI Payline at 4 percent. Cant believe it.

#microsky #plasmidsky #phagesky #phage

💥 Excited to introduce Bacformer 🦠 - the first foundation model for bacterial genomics. Bacformer represents genomes as sequences of ordered proteins, learning the “grammar” of how genes are arranged, interact and evolve. Preprint 📝: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n

Research for grants rather than grants for research. This kind of policy, especially with additional cuts to federal funding, will create perverse incentives that will have consequences on the actual science that this whole system is supposed to support. www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

Very excited to be co-organizing the next Keystone Symposia on Human Microbiomes, in Jan 2026 in Banff with Ami Bhatt and Harry Sokol. www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/... Speaker list includes Emily Balskus, Don Ingber, Mohamed Abou Donia, Tamia Harris-Tryon, and Julie Segre.

Zip "prevents internalization and destruction of newly released phage progeny, a phenomenon that we call the anti-Kronos effect after the Greek god who consumed his offspring. Zip activity promotes the accumulation of free phages in bacterial lysogen communities, thereby enhancing viral spread."

Stunning! An 8-hour time-lapse to show the Earth is rotating while capturing the Milky Way.

M⃣I⃣S⃣S⃣I⃣N⃣G⃣ L⃣I⃣N⃣K⃣S⃣ 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 paper by Sikora et al: metagenomic data from 1,313 ancient human remains over 37,000 years Identified >3,000 instances of known human pathogens Zoonotic pathogens begin to appear ~6,500 years ago coinciding with the rise of livestock domestication—major epidemiological shift

Mark the date: an incredible landmark as #solar power becomes EU's number one source of electricity in June 2025. Everything is impossible – until it's done. www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Measles virus kills ~100K people worldwide every year. Nearly all of these preventable deaths occur in young children in countries with poor access to vaccines. If you have the opportunity, protect your child, protect other children, protect immunocompromised folks...GET VACCINATED!!! 🙏

IDSA, along with AAP, APHA, ACP and others, has filed a lawsuit against HHS/Secretary Kennedy to stop unlawful changes to vaccine policy and defend public health. It is telling that learned societies uniformly oppose the vaccine policies of the HHS secretary. www.idsociety.org/news--public...

The full rotation of the Moon as recorded by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. -Credits: NASA

Sodium-iron batteries at grid scale: 200MW/400MWh, enough to "regulate up to 580 GWh annually." "The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid." 😍

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beautiful paper on translation start sites and extented SD motifs in Staph. aureus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Congrats to colleagues in Strasburg univ.!

Excited to share my new preprint: we show that for lab control and skin samples with low microbial biomass, metagenomics significantly outperforms 16S while DNA extraction method has minimal impact. 🧵 1/4 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Behind many scientists is a lifetime of invisible, unsustainable costs. From unpaid internships to underpaid postdocs, the economic toll of a STEM career is staggering—and it's pushing talent out. My new perspective explores this crisis. #STEM #AcademicBlueSky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

My God, the mindless destruction : www.al.com/politics/202... Only you can save Birmingham’s medical rainforest: op-ed from UAB researcher - al.com

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? This.

I’m excited to present my work on mobile genetic element evolution at #Evol2025 on Tuesday, June 24! Come by the Bioinformatics & Molecular Evolution session at 9:45am for my talk, “The little plasmid that could: evolution of a small antimicrobial resistance element” (room Athena F)

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

Another low for FIFA

Most Anericans today can no longer recall how much worse the diseases are than the vaccines.

Sums up the last 5 months very nicely

THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN BACTERIOLOGISTS 🦠 4th Annual Meeting of the Society Columbian University Medical School Washington, D. C., on Dec 30 - 31, 1902 👈 It also was likely the 1st time Yarrowia lipolytica was discussed at a meeting (although it wasn't called that for another 70 years).

Wherever you live in the world, your climate is getting warmer. 21st June is #ShowYourStripes day when we encourage everyone to use the warming stripes graphics to talk about climate change and how we are all already experiencing the consequences. Download your stripes: www.ShowYourStripes.info

Yeah… Science ain’t nothin’ to mess with Cash rules? Nah— Grants rule everything around me, G.R.E.A.M. Get the funding—dollar dollar scheme, y’all. I grew up on deadlines and tight scopes PI dreams soaked In lab coats and peer review quotes Scholar life—writing late in the night Jargon so dense […]

Andrew Ng on proposed cuts to U.S. funding for basic research: