How did @Nature become "prestigious" to scientists? In our opening article of Issue 09, writer Robert Reason traces the journal's history. By understanding how Nature’s prestige was constructed, we can also clarify which elements are deserved and which are entrenched.

Troubleshooting common errors in assemblies of long-read metagenomes - @merenbey.bsky.social @banfieldlab.bsky.social go.nature.com/44P7nSm

Our new paper on high-throughput isolation of Bifidobacterium just got published! A very nice adventure starting with the supervision of @lamhaiha.bsky.social, a talented intern, and a nice collab with our BSight expert @isaacyueyuan.bsky.social! Stay tuned for more isolation and Bifido work! :)

✨ Latest exciting story of the group in @nature.com. Here, we go beyond SNPs and built a species-wide atlas of genetic variants in yeast. With >1,000 near T2T genomes, we show how large genomic variations affect trait diversity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #microsky #microbiome

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

The latest story from the @haploteam highlights the phenotypic impact of acquired subgenomes in allopolyploids, through the lens of 1,060 Brettanomyces bruxellensis genomes. Nice collaboration with @univbordeaux.bsky.social @unistra.fr @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The most viruslike microbe to date was discovered by accident when researchers sequenced the DNA inside this tiny ocean critter. That story and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Short-read metagenomic sequencing cannot recover genomes from many abundant marine prokaryotes due to high strain heterogeneity and platform-inherent GC bias (likely viruses, too), but Nanopore long reads can address this. A results thread on our recent preprint 🧵.

Super thrilled to share our labor of love from the Asian Skin Microbiome Program! We collected >3,500 skin samples, built metagenomic libraries w/ >70 billion reads and >10TB of data to study heterogeneity of the skin microbiome in the general population (200 adults, 18 sites) t.co/ZylbJMpvpw

I am very happy (and anxious) to share with you our most recent work in which we evaluated four of the most popular long-read assemblers, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... and tell you just a little bit about it in the following 🧵

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

Our latest paper, in which @brinda.eu (along with @zaminiqbal.bsky.social and others) introduces phylogenetic compression for storage and search of enormous microbial genome libraries, was published today in @naturemethods.bsky.social: rdcu.be/eg4OA 1/

In 1904, a physician took soil he had “impregnated with a living emulsion” of a virulent bacterium, Serratia marcescens, and sprinkled it in front of the UK House of Commons. This was an early experiment to study how microbes spread through buildings and cause infections...

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)

Interactive online show about the microbial world from the Museum of Natural history at Oxford Uni. Cool ideas. www.oum.ox.ac.uk/bacterialwor...

Another great piece from Asimov press: www.asimov.press/p/mirror-life

A new view of #SpeciesConcepts by @jeannettewhitton.bsky.social and me, clarifying time frames while unifying interbreeding, genealogy, and traits. A general-purpose species should be a reproductive community (bound by cohesive processes) viewed retrospectively (RRCC).  doi.org/10.18061/bss...

Another small and interesting historical story from Asimov press. This time about the Watson's central dogma.

Excited to share our latest work, where we show how to achieve high-throughput sequencing of DNA containing non-canonical bases using Nanopore (@nanoporetech.com) and de novo basecalling enabled by spliced-based data-augmentation. #nanopore #basecaller #syntheticbiology

A fun idea, using Bacillus subtilis to sense the TNT explosive

BS seems a nice place to save and share some interesting links, hope this can help others as well. Starting with one more (and never-ending) reminder on p-values misconceptions, with a nice practical example.