Humans and bacteria share strategies to defend against viruses. We wondered: could they use each other's genes? Yes, both can! Bacteria can use human immune genes to defend against phages AND Human cells can use bacterial genes for viral defense. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share the latest work from Zunair Khurram, a PhD student in our lab! Zunair has developed a new method, MxSure, to infer within-host substitution rates and transmission thresholds from longitudinal isolate and metagenomic sequencing data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Microbes that have the greatest genomic potential for secondary metabolism tend to be multicellular. Here, we show that signatures of ancestral BGC expansions within 3 bacterial phyla and 2 fungal lineages coincide with origins of complex multicellularity [1/12] 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For #bbm2026 folks - come check out my poster on 3FL, #21! It's part of the data going out on my soon-to-be published preprint, some aspects can definitely use feedback. 🧫🦠

Follow-up to my last blog post: I now look at assembly polishing with Dorado v2 and the new [email protected] model from @nanoporetech.com. rrwick.github.io/2026/06/19/d...

For anyone doing ONT Microbial Genomics, please take 1 minute (less?) to tell us which assembly metrics you care most about when evaluating whether an assembly is "good". We are doing a benchmark of different QC tools (barcode/adapter trimming and QC filtering). microbial-qc-survey.streamlit.app

New blog post! I analyse the new [email protected] basecalling model from @nanoporetech.com and discuss the conspicuous lack of a new sup model: rrwick.github.io/2026/06/11/d...

Folddisco is now published @natbiotech.nature.com. It’s a fast motif search for similar 3D DISCOntinuous residues like catalytic sites or zinc fingers across the entire protein universe. 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💾 folddisco.foldseek.com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 🌐 https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco

I'm happy to share the first pre-print of out Lab! 🎉 Introducing ArchaeaHQ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We curated 21,644 genomes across all 4 archaeal kingdoms to bridge the gap in public datasets for computational biology What is inside ArchaeaHQ... (1/2)

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco - @martinsteinegger.bsky.social go.nature.com/4g8lCb0

Thrilled that our paper "Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities" is out! 🎉🦠🧬 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... w/ @paulbrainey.bsky.social, Petros Skiadas, Paulien Hogeweg, @bedutilh.bsky.social

World-leading Aussie science fighting #AntimicrobialResistance! PhD student George Bouras added 17M bacterial protein predictions to the #AlphaFold database. This was made possible by a partnership between BioCommons & @pawseycentre.bsky.social#AntimicrobialResistance#AlphaFoldo containerise #ColabFold on Setonix. Read more 🔗

If you do any work with DNA sequencing at some point, you need to assemble the reads. Usually, we just use the contigs, but that ignores important evidence from your data, so @vijinim.bsky.social wrote agtools to explore the assembly graph and learn more! academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Thrilled to share a major milestone from our long-running collaboration with Zuzanna Drulis-Kawa's lab in Wrocław — DepoCatalog, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com: 129 Klebsiella phage depolymerases, 75 capsule types, 5-class structural framework and public database. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our method, savont, for generating amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) for long-read amplicons is now on bioRxiv. Work with @lh3lh3.bsky.social and help from @mkddueholm.bsky.social and team (Marie Riisgaard-Jensen, @kirk3gaard.bsky.social, Kasper Skytte Andersen) github.com/bluenote-157... 1/6

New preprint! 🚨 Phage proteins don't act alone. Phages rely on homooligomerisation to assemble identical protein subunits into functional forms. But figuring out those exact configurations experimentally is tough. Learn about our approach in our new preprint! 👇 (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Beyond thrilled that our paper ‘Co-migration of hundreds of microbial species over metres drives selection and promotes non-motile hitchhikers’ has been accepted in Nature Communications! 🎉🦠 (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I've been wondering about role of reference assembly contiguity when training/tuning an ONT basecaller model. Stumbled into implementing a crude forward pass in #Julia with tuned weights, contig level genome ref vs complete genome ref. Model behaves very differently on same POD5 signal input! 💻🧬

During my PhD, @milja001.bsky.social and I started counting phage genomes, and tried to make them available in useful formats with useful metadata. We also described the extent of sequenced phage genomes at the time. Five years on, we've had a look at what's changed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🎉 Excited to share that our paper, “agtools: A Software Framework to Manipulate Assembly Graphs”, has been accepted in Bioinformatics Advances. (1/n) 🔗 GitHub: github.com/Vini2/agtools 📄 Paper: academic.oup.com/bioinformati... #bioinformatics #genomics #openscience

Our new preprint is out! We train a transformer on gene order and gene content of bacterial pathogens, applying it to a range of epidemiological and evolutionary analyses (1/8) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Want to find #prophage in your #bacteria genomes? We built PhiSpy a long time ago, and now we've created a new web page for it: linsalrob.github.io/PhiSpyWeb/ Best of all, the data never leaves your computer! #phage #phagesky

This one means a lot. Our paper, “Large extrachromosomal replicons are widespread across bacterial lineages and show coordinated replication termination and spatial coupling with the chromosome,” is out! doi.org/10.1038/s414...

🎉 New in @plosbiology.org: Temperate phages of Klebsiella pneumoniae show capsule-driven host tropism — but how? The working assumption was depolymerases: enzymes that chew through the bacterial sugar capsule. Turns out that's not the whole story. 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

🎉Excited to share our new preprint! TIR domains from diverse animals, including human TLR4, are catalytically active and produce cyclic ADP-ribose (cADPR). This enzymatic activity is widespread in animals and conserved across the tree of life. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share our new work on how phages escape bacterial immunity. We show that a phage homing endonuclease drives segmental amplification of anti-defense genes, pointing to a versatile and rapid mode of adaptation. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #PhageSky #MicroSky

10 years after the first FAMSA paper, its successor is now published in Nat Biotech! We believe that FAMSA2 can enable analyses of large protein collections that were previously unattainable. Thank you, Andrzej and Cedric, for great collaboration www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you developed a new #bioinformatics tool to understand #phage or #virus? Make sure you add it to #awesome-virome github.com/shandley/awe...

Whenever I presented Phold, I was frequently asked "can you do the same beyond phages?" We ( @oschwengers.bsky.social @linsalrob.bsky.social @binomicalabs.org et al) finally did it with Baktfold github.com/gbouras13/ba... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Want to annotate a bacterial genome with structures? @oschwengers.bsky.social bakta and @gbouras13.bsky.social phold got together, and the result is Baktfold: protein annotation across the microbial tree of life using structures www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #phagesky #microsky #microbiomesky

📣Huge preprint 🔔 Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.

How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie... Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

45 novel protein folds in the updated AFESM (AFDB + ESMatlas) manuscript: • 12 high-confidence folds in AFESM • 33 by ColabFold-repredicting 2.3M low-quality domains We show AFDB captures most domains already and ESMfold struggles with novelty 🌏 afesm.foldseek.com 📄 biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New review paper hot off the presses in @natureportfolio.nature.com, check it out if you wanna reframe your understanding of viral ecology!

Happy to have made a small contribution for @gbouras13.bsky.social's study. Hope this is just one of many examples in independent researcher collaboration with academic scientists! #archaeasky folks, this pipeline rules for global baseline annotation for archaea doi.org/10.64898/202... 💻🧬🧫🦠

New paper from Hugh Cottingham, @katholt.bsky.social , @yekwah.bsky.social @nenadmacesic.bsky.social and co. Great to see the speed/accuracy tradeoff info here, I don't think I've seen it laid out like this before. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

We have updated the yeast AlphaFold3 co-folding map. The 15GB docker also has an updated streamlit app that is more responsive and easier to search through if you want to just browse the results. There will be many false positives ! We added known interactions for those wanting to filter.

ggCaller v1.5.0 is out! We've removed the integrated clustering to enable users to benefit from new Panaroo features. Now, ggCaller generates GFFs that can be used with any clustering method. But for fans of an integrated ggCaller pangenome workflow read on... github.com/bacpop/ggCal...

#Archaeasky folks - I'm curious. How do you feel about the dorado polish bacteria mode for your archaeal ONT long read assembled genomes? I know it holds up well with bacteria, but archaea's always been a bit funny. 💻🧬

The pre-print for Slorado and openfish is out. biorxiv.org/content/10.6... You can do @nanoporetech.com basecalling with not just NVIDIA GPU, but also using a range of AMD GPU. Would be useful since popular GPUs are now 💸💸💸💸(& hard to buy), Work by @bonson-wong.bsky.social

Myloasm, our long-read metagenome assembler, is now published! w/ @mgmarin.bsky.social and @lh3lh3.bsky.social Very rewarding after > a year of development and countless hours thinking about assembly. Thanks to beta testers, Li lab, and reviewers who gave very helpful feedback. rdcu.be/famFj

AlphaFold database has entered the era of complexes. Together with NVIDIA, DeepMind and EBI, we use ColabFold, OpenFold and MMseqs2-GPU to predict ~31 million complexes (homo & hetro-dimers) resulting in 1.8 million high-quality predictions 📄 research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/ass... 🌐 alphafold.ebi.ac.uk

You asked, we listened. Millions of AI-predicted protein complex structures are now available in the #AlphaFold Database. This spans homodimers from 20 of the most studied species, including humans, as well as the World Health Organization’s priority pathogens list. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t...

Some background to this, and an example I think of Phil's attitudes towards fostering students and encouraging others. I never got a chance to meet Phil in person, but will share his act of generosity that helped myself and @hdashnow.bsky.social and I think had in indelible mark on our careers. 1/8

ProteinTTT is now easy to run on Hugging Face Spaces and Google Colab. We’ll also be presenting the paper at ICLR 2026 🇧🇷 🤗 Hugging Face Space: huggingface.co/spaces/pimen... ⚙️ Google Colab: colab.research.google.com/drive/1l_h7c... 🧵👇

Until joining @loolibear.bsky.social's lab in July, I embarrassingly hadn't had much experience with plasmids. So when I started, Leah said "here you go, have a look at this dataset". What a fun ride this has been. Preprint out today and thread below www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Joining the All-The-Bacteria project provides an annualised return on investment of 8.9% bacterial genomes.

Courtesy of @martibartfast.bsky.social , we have a new release of AllTheBacteria which adds another 322,920 assemblies, covering all ENA (illumina, isolate) prokaryotes to May 2025. allthebacteria.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ov...

@wytamma.bsky.social 's WASM tools have transformed my experience of teaching Python to first year undergraduate biologists this year. Since last year, I've been teaching ~400 undergrads how to code (functions, lists, dictionaries, loops) over (one hour intro lecture +) two 2-hour practicals. 1/n

The @isvm-society.bsky.social is organising monthly #virus of #microbes (including #phage). Nominate a speaker and register for the upcoming events at isvm.org/ivom/