For cash-strapped and early-career researchers, archived data sets can fuel new science go.nature.com/41pxVXX

Applications are now open for the 2026 Metagenomic Virus Discovery workshop in Stellenbosch, South Africa Last years workshop brought together a fantastic community of researchers and our teachers were able to provide one-on-one support to each participant Find out more at mvdworkshop.com

Applications are open for the 2026 Metagenomic Virus Discovery Workshop! The Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation, Stellenbosch University is hosting a 5 day hands-on workshop run by experts in the field from around the world Find out more at our website mvdworkshop.com

Imposter syndrome? This man referred to pipetting as being “on the tools” to the technician fixing the BSC today.

We found a viral Trojan Horse: a virus can hide inside another virus.This one surprised us: deltaviruses don’t just borrow a helper virus. They can travel inside it. A literal Trojan Horse “virus-in-a-virus” route into cells. 🤯 Kudos to 1st author @viroscope.bsky.social and co-authors !

Great news for the toxic PI that wants RNA seq data analysed in under a minute.

Wonderful to host @jonathonmifsud.bsky.social at UQ today for the SCMB Seminar Series. An excellent journey using protein structural information to study viral evolution across deep time, including new insights into the evolutionary history of Flaviviridae (RIP) and viral membrane fusion mechanisms.

It took a while, and many many people, but the offflu wildlife working group has brought together a (MASSIVE) overview of avian influenza epi and surveillance, 2020-20 👉 offlu.org/publications...

@mbhall88.bsky.social was an absolute tour de force on this project, taking something we all had little experience in (linear plasmids, and gram positive bugs!) and turning it into an exciting, novel, and detailed report on an emerging pathogen. A must read!

Excited to share our new paper on producing recombinant bat antibodies! 🦇🧬 Out now in Frontiers in Immunology: www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm... #bat #antibodies #immunoglobulin #chiroptera #antiviral

A little over 12 months ago, 150 scientists from 16 countries gathered in Geelong to reflect on the past 30 years of henipavirus research, current developments and future directions. The outcomes of that meeting are detailed in our recent publication in EID below. wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

Thanks to a post on iNaturalist, and a series of serendipitous events, an Australian flowering plant thought extinct for almost 60 years has been rediscovered. au.news.yahoo.com/photo-leads-...

I'm excited that our review paper on superinfection exclusion in insect-specific flaviviruses is now published. This comprehensive review summarizes the experimental data on the ability of different ISFs to cause SIE and suggests future pathways in SIE research: www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/18...

Global solidarity in genomic surveillance improves early detection of acute respiratory virus threats. "Importantly, these benefits cannot be attained by siloed expansion in countries that already possess strong capacity." Well done to the team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An interesting way to look at encoded structural characters to build alignments and trees downstream. This takes structural phylogenetics one step further in the post-AlphaFold era. #Evolution #Science #StrPhy On Confidence Assessment in Structure-Aware Alignments doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Check out our new print that combines dense sequencing and phylodynamics to uncover a bunch of 😎 things about an understudied virus. - Doesn't evolve for 10 months a year ✅ - Uses some mossies for maintenance, others for spread ✅ - Established in Northeast for ~300 years ✅

Detection of Jingmen tick virus (JMTV) in humans in Türkiye, 2022. JMTV/ALSV perplexes me because it’s constantly detected but no colleagues have been able to culture these viruses (well) in mammalian cells. Real arbovirus? Or a stowaway in CCHF co-infection? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Great to see the work by @chrismcmillan.bsky.social and team highlighted like this.

"These practical advantages, combined with the improved immunogenicity demonstrated here, make HD-MAPs a compelling alternative to electroporation for DNA vaccine delivery in outbreak and pandemic contexts." Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1099/jgv....

The government can’t claim that medical research is a priority while failing to treat it as one. Nine in 10 leading researchers in Australia are missing out on government support for world‑class proposals, leaving exceptional talent uncertain about their future.

Dear colleagues - the international meeting on arboviruses and their vectors planned in Hamburg, Germany for 2026, is going to be moved to Liverpool instead. Logistical reasons beyond our control necessitated this move. Still the same dates- see you on Merseyside!

Great to share the story behind our recent paper on needle-free DNA vaccine delivery! Microarray patches like the one being developed by Vaxxas may help unlock the pandemic preparedness potential of DNA vaccines - read more microb.io/48PTJ2l Manuscript: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Used @plasmidsaurus.bsky.social RNA-seq for the first time. $50USD a sample. Sent 42 samples from Australia. Dropped off 50uL cells in Zymo shield on Dec 5th at RT. Just got data back, almost all at or above 10million reads. Online analysis tool fine but will do own analysis. Spread the word.

It’s starting to feel a lot like Christ(Flavi)mas.

Yup, Colin is right & that NYT piece is infuriating, painting an unreal picture of Kennedy & his band of extreme anti-vaccine activists & conspiracy theorists—who cause suffering & death—as a group of compassionate folks trying to give grieving parents meaning when their unvaxxed kids die of measles

Out now in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety.org MCMV-infected dendritic cells switch off MHC-II (via Ciita) while turning on migration via viral GPCR M33 – converting DCs into stealth couriers for viral spread. Work with Helen Farrell lab and @chrismcmillan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1099/mgen...

SMBE Australasian Protein Structural Phylogenetics Meeting 📄 Abstract submission deadline: Nov 28 Please submit your abstracts by Friday! Registration is free, but limited to 50 in-person attendees. ✈️ Travel grant applications deadline: Nov 28 🔗 biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/strphy26/str...

Are influenza B viruses really “human only”? New review synthesises evidence from serology & metagenomics for #IBV / IBV-like viruses in animals and aquatic hosts. One Health gaps remain. With @marioskoutsakos.viralvaxlab.com @duckswabber.bsky.social www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/17...

Starting to say “publish or perish” less fatalistically and more threateningly.

Was my pleasure to present our brain organoid model of flavivirus infection at Organoid Nexus symposium in sunny Melbourne.

New preprint from the Khromykh/ @slonchak.bsky.social /Short lab 👇 In primary human nasal epithelia, #Omicron BA.5 & XBB show enhanced ciliated-cell tropism and a striking cilia-gene shutdown plus apoptosis/inflammation, unlike ancestral virus or BA.1. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Where to start, with a statement like this? "Tim Ayres said the cuts were aimed at refocusing … CSIRO towards research priorities, such as critical minerals, iron & steel production in Australia." From some rando down the bus stop, one would brush it off. But this is from our Science Minister 🤯

If you'd like to celebrate the biology of viruses - or the fight against viral diseases - this winter, try out our free and updated #VirusSnowflake designs. Please share, and if you have any photos of Virus Snowflakes in your area it would be lovely to see them! cvr-engagement.co.uk/virus-snowfl...

🚨 NEW: The majority holder of the world's genetic sequence data is a bad actor who can cut off access to critics and competing services. We've tolerated this for years, and now it threatens the pandemic treaty. Time for WHO to step in. With @ctrlalttim.com: www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/to-f...

I want to spell this out in case the implications aren't clear: This means all public tools/webapps of GISAID data (all the ones you've been used to seeing thru the pandemic, as far as we can tell) are prohibited. The file allowed this. Cut that - cut off all tools the public & others were using.

🧬 MiM2025 — ASM Queensland Annual Meeting Join us for a full day of microbiology at Griffith Uni, Gold Coast! 📅 Sat 22 Nov 2025 | Free for members 🎙 Featuring keynote speakers Greg Cook, @duckswabber.bsky.social Michelle Wille & Subir Sarker. 🔗 Register: www.trybooking.com/DGRHL #ASM #Micro #MiM2025

Had a wonderful time at #HCVFLAVI2025 in Singapore presenting our Flavi ncRNA work from the Khromykh lab and was chuffed to pick up a short talk award. Here I am with other awardees demonstrating a normal distribution. Hope to see you again at #HCVFLAVI2026

Final day of #HCFLAVI2025 with a great talk from @maringerlab.bsky.social on 3D models of dengue microvascular dysfunction, using gorgeous liver microvascular spheroids, to unpack #dengue vascular pathology.

🚨 SAVE THE DATE 🚨 MiM2025 — ASM QLD’s annual microbiology meeting 🧫✨ 📍 Gold Coast | 🗓️ 22 Nov 2025 🧪 Talks & 5-min #Microbites for students 📨 Abstracts due 20 Oct — send to [email protected] @aussocmic.bsky.social #MiM2025 #microbiology

Haunted lately by @galaxyproject.bsky.social CO₂e estimates for jobs. This one MEGAHIT assembly: ~450g CO2e. I've run this ~150k times on HPC, ~75 tonnes of CO2e 😬. Perhaps ARC/NHMRC would accept Australian Carbon Credit Units as part of the grant cost for offset? What others are doing in AUS/INT?

🌟 Thrilled to share that my lab’s first publication is now out in @natmetabolism.nature.com. Congrats to the team 🎉 🧠 We discovered that neurons use endogenous fatty acids as an energy fuel, challenging long-standing models of sugars being the exclusive energy source for neurons. 1/3

New preprint alert! 🦟 <-> 🦠 <-> 🧑 I am thrilled to share our latest study on alphavirus host adaptation. More specifically, on how a single codon helps blunt alphavirus-induced host innate immune responses in mosquito and human cells. Continue reading for more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New Web Resource Alert! 🚨 We're delighted to share Viro3D a database of >85000 viral protein structure predictions from >4400 human & animal viruses. 🔗 viro3d.cvr.gla.ac.uk 📄 www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.... @molsystbiol.org @cvrinfo.bsky.social @uofgmvls.bsky.social #Virology #AlphaFold 🧪 🦠

Congrats to @summabibby.bsky.social @naphakm.bsky.social Daniel Watterson et al. here at SCMB on the first high-res cryo-EM structures of yellow fever virus! Striking vaccine vs virulent particle differences and a single R380 residue shaping antigenicity & neutralisation. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

The use of attenuated SC2 JN.1 as a bivalent vaccine vector. Mutate (D130A) in nsp16, delete FCS in spike, delete accessory ORFs, and/or modify transcription regulatory sequences, then add prefusion RSV F. Successfully protects, although modified TRS seem to over-attenuate. doi.org/10.1126/scia...

🧪🦠🖥️🧬🧫🔬 The Roadmap for equitable use of public microbiome data -including the Data Reuse Information Tag (DRI)- by the #DataReuseConsortium. Must read if you use or produce microbiome data! Kudos to the Data Reuse Core Team for their hard work! doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Establishment of reverse genetics systems for Colorado tick fever virus. Remind me never to complain about monopartite reverse genetics systems. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Impressive work on the effect of #Wolbachia in 60! strains of DENV. Like earlier reports, DENV-1,2,4 was strongly inhibited. DENV-3 isolates had more variable & weaker inhibition. Given the range of genotypes, this is a strong foundation to examine viral genetic determinants of susceptibility.

Transcriptomic response of mosquitoes to Japanese encephalitis virus and identification of its potential entry factors www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How can mosquitoes tolerate viral infections? In our latest preprint we show that mosquitoes that can regulate their metabolism after infection can tolerate viral infections better. Thanks to all the authors for all your ideas and contributions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...