As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease. There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done." 1/🧵

#Correspondence Launching the IUCN Microbial Conservation Specialist Group as a global safeguard for microbial biodiversity #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One of the seminal projects from my Genomics Aotearoa Postdoc position with Associate Professor Kim Handley is now published online at @isme-microbes.bsky.social Communications!! 🥳🦠 "Salinity-driven niche differentiation within the aquatic Luna-1 subcluster"

New paper out! doi.org/10.1111/1755... Dental calculus allows us to study the oral microbiome of wild #mammals, but it's still underutilised! 🦷🦠 In this study, we recover oral #microbiome data from the dental calculus of 32 mammal species and share recommendations for future research. #museomics

Back to office, but mentally still in Barcelona and #ESEB2025 🦎 The range of questions, approaches and study systems was fascinating -- I got plenty of inspiration for my own work and my reading list has grown quite a lot!

Fantastic dental calculus and where to find it Johnny Richards and team (@markella-morait.bsky.social + curators from 5 museums) survey >140 mammalian species with >1,600 specimens to understand what factors determine dental calculus formation. #aDNA #museomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...