It’s that wonderful time of year again. A new GTDB release is out :)

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...

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

We're very happy to release our new database Metalog metalog.embl.de ! It offers manually curated and harmonised contextual data for 110k metagenomics samples across the globe, incl. precomputed taxonomic profiles, for interactive browsing and for download 🧵 1/7 #microsky

Soils contain an amazing diversity of functions encoded in plasmids. The Global Soil Plasmidome Resource: 98,728 soil plasmids from 6,860 samples. Led by @mattlabguy.bsky.social and @apcamargo.bsky.social at @jgi.doe.gov @biosci.lbl.gov @berkeleylab.lbl.gov www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨New preprint out! We present a foundational genomic resource of human gut microbiome viruses. It delivers high-quality, deeply curated data spanning taxonomy, predicted hosts, structures, and functions, providing a reference for gut virome research. (1/8) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're thrilled to announce SeqHub, an AI-enabled platform for biological sequence analysis. SeqHub brings together sequence search, genome annotation, and data sharing in one place.

Our @narjournal.bsky.social manuscript is out! It explores the growth of the GTDB (gtdb.ecogenomic.org) since its inception, as well as updates to the website, methodology, policies, and major taxonomic and nomenclatural changes over the past three years. academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

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...

🌎👩‍🔬 For 15+ years biology has accumulated petabytes (million gigabytes) of🧬DNA sequencing data🧬 from the far reaches of our planet.🦠🍄🌵 Logan now democratizes efficient access to the world’s most comprehensive genetics dataset. Free and open. doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Out in @natbiotech.nature.com: Metagenome taxonomy profilers usually ignore unknown species. SingleM is an accurate profiler which doesn't, even detecting phyla with no MAGs. Profiles of 700,000 metagenomes at sandpiper.qut.edu.au. A 🧵

Preprint alert from the group 🚨 super fast grep-like sequence selection

Scaling laws of bacterial and archaeal plasmids www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Excited to announce our first interactive article on sandbox.bio, about genomic ranges: sandbox.bio/concepts/gen... Move & resize the ranges to see how that affects bedtools operations like merge and intersect in real time!

New pre-print out \o/ All about CRISPR, metagenomes, and what you learn when you collect (a lot of) spacers from natural communities, with @apcamargo.bsky.social @urineri.bsky.social @lhug.bsky.social but also Uri Gophna, Nikhil George (not on Bsky I think) & others at JGI doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The Koonin Law of Computatoinal Biology: Whenever you think you have a great idea in computational or evolutionary biology, it will already have been published by Eugene Koonin in the mid 90ies.

At Tatta Bio, we have been thinking deeply about the sequence-to-function problem. We believe that before AI can power functional prediction, we first need to rethink how we curate, manage, and share sequence data. Here, we share our initial ideas on what we are building next:

Announcing myloasm, a new long-read (ONT R10/PacBio) metagenome assembler that I've been working on during my postdoc in the Heng Li lab (@lh3lh3.bsky.social). myloasm-docs.github.io

Our new paper is out in @science.org! By exploring the rich genetic diversity of Brazil, we show how fine-scale genomic analyses reveal that this diversity, rooted in Indigenous ancestry and centuries of complex demographic history, plays a key role in population health.

Very proud of my colleagues and friends for their amazing publication out in Science today! Nunes et al. "Admixture’s impact on Brazilian population evolution and health" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @hunemeier.bsky.social @macscastro.bsky.social 👏

schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2... #MicroSky #Archaea #ArchaeaSky #SymbioSky

We happily present: “Bakta Web – rapid and standardized genome annotation on scalable infrastructures” @OxUniPress NAR’s Web Server issue doi.org/10.1093/nar/... Easy to use, no registration, fast, scalable, various visualizations, in sync with Bakta CLI: bakta.computational.bio (1/5)

Unique investigation of some errors in long read assemblers. In particular these remarkably chimeric contigs are 😱, if rare.... Improving long read assemblers is definitely the space to be in when it comes to the future of metagenomics, as short reads won't be part of it 😉

A 1.0 release for Sandpiper. 700,000 microbial community profiles (3x the last version, 4.7 Pbp metaG), searchable via the @ace-gtdb.bsky.social R226 taxonomy that just dropped. MetaGs are going exponential, but we are still nowhere near a MAG for all species. sandpiper.qut.edu.au #microsky 🧬🖥️ 1/2

GTDB release 10 based on RefSeq 226 (R10-RS226) is live at gtdb.ecogenomic.org. This release covers 732,475 genomes (22% increase) and has 143,6141 species clusters (37% increase). Release notes at: forum.gtdb.ecogenomic.org/t/announcing.... Release statistics at: gtdb.ecogenomic.org/stats/r226.

Is the genome just a bag of genes? A new paper in Science now reports that for two thirds of an organisms' genes the position along the chromosome is actually very tightly constrained! Amazing work from my favorite night scientist Martin Lercher and his team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

CoverM is published! CoverM: Read alignment statistics for metagenomics academic.oup.com/bioinformati... #jcampubs

🚨New paper!🚨 A comprehensive take on the origins and evolution of translation factors & how these essential players evolved across the tree of life. 🌍🧬 Led by Evrim Fer @uwmadisonmdtp.bsky.social grad student! 👏 Free access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social

The abstract submission & registration for #RdRpSummit2025 is NOW OPEN!!! 🎉🙌 Do you work on RNA virus discovery using RdRps? Are you joining the #ViBioM2025 in Portugal? Consider submitting your research in one of our sessions! More info: RdRp.io

Publishing a paper in Nature while based in Brazil is an incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to the authors! I'm excited to give this a proper read :)

One of the great things about bioinformatics is how open it can be. Contributing to a project you admire can actually get you involved in it :)

I'm very happy to report that Matt Schechter's PhD work is now online as a pre-print: "Ribosomal protein phylogeography offers quantitative insights into the efficacy of genome-resolved surveys of microbial communities", www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here's a little 🧵 about it.

This preprint makes a point that is valid for a lot of machine learning approaches. Organisms or genes are linked by evolutionary history; they are not independent. This results in correlation between learning and test sets, and often in over-optimistic evaluations of the methods' outcome.

In Science Advances: "We took a deep dive into over 1.8 million bacterial and archaeal genomes to see how much of their diversity we’ve actually captured. Turns out that despite all the genomes we’ve sequenced, we’ve only scratched the surface." -Dongying Wu 🖥️🧬🦠 biosciences.lbl.gov/2025/01/17/t...

🚨Postdoc position(s) alert🚨 If you like to develop new bioinformatic tools for *human* microbiome analysis, are interested by virus/phages, we (JGI Viral Genomics and Microbiome Data groups) may have a great position for you ! No official job posting yet, but email or DM if you are interested !

We found that many bacterial species use exogenous peptidoglycan fragments - released by lysis of neighboring cells - as a general danger signal, triggering a danger response that protects bacteria against many dangers: biofilm formation. Details here 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New year, new assemblies! I'm excited to announce Autocycler, my new tool for consensus assembly of long-read bacterial genomes! It's the successor to Trycycler, designed to be faster and less reliant on user intervention. Check it out: github.com/rrwick/Autoc... (1/5)

RNA virologists, check out "The protein structurome of Orthornavirae and its dark matter" by Pascal Mutz, Valerian Dolja, Eugene Koonin et al (including @simrouxvirus.bsky.social, @apcamargo.bsky.social, @urineri.bsky.social, @anamarijabutkovic.bsky.social) journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Don't use red and green data lines/surfaces in the same panel please #chemsky. It can be difficult for some colorblind readers to differentiate them. I've accepted (in principle) 2 papers today, and both sets of authors were asked to remove red/green colour contrasts www.nature.com/articles/d41...

An interesting paper for the EV (extracellular vesicle) fans by Patel et al. @ahnaskop.bsky.social lab: "Extracellular vesicles, including large translating vesicles called midbody remnants, are released during the cell cycle" www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/...

Can LLM agents discover novel protein functions? Introducing Gaia Agent 🌎 🤖: an AI biologist capable of reasoning across genomic contexts to predict functions of proteins! Gaia Agent is now integrated with Gaia Search at gaia.tatta.bio

If you are at #NeurIPS2024 don't miss @ancornman1.bsky.social's talk on OMG/gLM2 at 9AM! @workshopmlsb.bsky.social East meeting room 11,12

Excited to be at #NeurIPS this week. @ancornman1.bsky.social will give a spotlight talk at the @workshopmlsb.bsky.social on gLM2/OMG! Please reach out if you want to chat about gLM2/OMG/Gaia and our latest projects😇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very cool work from Yang Lu et al. demonstrating miscalibration of BLASTP’s E-values and generating well-calibrated values via a knockoff-based approach (cc @mikelove.bsky.social) - academic.oup.com/bioinformati...! More analyses could benefit from knockoff-based approaches.

🧬🔍There are 50 petabases of freely-available DNA sequencing data. We introducing Logan Search which allows you to search for any DNA sequence in minutes, bringing Earth’s largest genomic resource to your fingertips. 🏔️ logan-search.org 🏔️ #Genomics #Bioinformatics #OpenScience

Hello 🦋 #protein / #microbio / #BioML community! We are excited to release Gaia🌎, a context-aware protein search tool, extending protein search and discovery capabilities beyond sequence and structure, to include *genomic context*. Search your favorite protein sequences with on gaia.tatta.bio

New GPU-based MMseqs2: 20x faster searches on a single L40S (approx. as fast as a RTX 4090) vs. a 128-core CPU. This work enables to set up a very cost-efficient ColabFold MSA GPU server. 🧵🧵 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💾 mmseqs.com 🗞️ developer.nvidia.com/blog/boost-a...

The OMG dataset: An Open MetaGenomic corpus for mixed-modality genomic language modeling From friends at Tatta Bio GitHub: github.com/TattaBio/OMG www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Terrabacteria: redefining bacterial envelope diversity, biogenesis and evolution #NatureRevMicro from Simonetta Gribaldo www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AntiDefenseFinder! And it is available also as an option with DefenseFinder: defensefinder.mdmlab.fr Exploring the diversity of anti-defense systems across prokaryotes, phages, and mobile genetic elements www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...