wow this really looks like a mountain of LLM generated reviews and/or proposals

maybe phd programs should skip the research training part and train people to write applications, instead, since that's all you'll have time to do anyway

With a +64% increase in MSCA 2025 scholarship applications, funding cut-offs reached absurd levels. (e.g. a score of 96/100 remained unfunded, got news today from a candidate I sponsored). When rating is this compressed, a lottery among top-rated proposals deserves serious consideration I think.

At long last, my final PhD chapter is out: we developed a novel evolutionary simulator of bacterial pangenomes, Pansim, fitting it to data from >600K genomes using a likelihood-free framework, PopPUNK-mod, to explore neutral and adaptive pangenome dynamics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Bioinformatics orphanage - repository of bioinformatics packages that are no longer maintained upstream but still have users, or is a dependency for other more frequently used packages. I think this is a fun idea, and potentially an important one for the future...💻🧬 github.com/bioinformati...

Very excited about this latest work led by @jermp.bsky.social! Since it's initial release, SSHash has served as the basis for several other tools (Fulgor, piscem, etc.). It was already very fast. It is now *substantially* faster! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"Machine learning-based lineage prediction from antimicrobial susceptibility testing phenotypes for Escherichia coli sequence type 131 clade C surveillance across infection types" Spoiler: the MDR ST131-C is pervasive in UTIs, underlying BSI trends. doi.org/10.1099/mgen... @microbiologysociety.org

How does E. coli age? According to this #mBio study, the the decisive factor driving growth decline in E. coli is not the presence of protein aggregates, but the fraction of the intracellular space they occupy. Learn more: asm.social/2KZ

📣 preprint alert! We sampled #klebsiella isolates from💩 patients when they entered the hospital & 🩸 after development of infection. 🎯 We tracked phenotypic changes & correlate them w genotypic changes. @klebclub.bsky.social -in collab with Clermont-Ferrand lab #microsky 🧵 doi.org/10.64898/202...

The changing roles of Escherichia coli www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

"..based on a common wavefront design that can be adapted to support a variety of dynamic programming algorithms: local, global, and semi-global alignment of genomic and protein sequences with a variety of commonly used scoring schemes" from @martinsteinegger.bsky.social andco

"Ethical standards do not become optional because the participants are African." bktitanji.substack.com/p/how-unethi...

I wrote a piece on LLMs, citation metrics, and the institution of science. It's been up for a couple of days, but it is officially "out" now.

Preprint Alert! With @tmthrz.bsky.social and @rayanchikhi.bsky.social we aim to tackle practical unitigs compression! A thread:

If you ever need to fuzzy search some DNA, sassy is your tool. Please spread the word; I think many people just outside my own circle could benefit from this :) cc @rickbitloo.bsky.social github.com/RagnarGrootK...

Mapping the evolutionary path towards multi-drug resistance in the pandemic Escherichia coli ST131 lineage https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.08.692488v1

Lovely to feature alongside the brilliant Birgit Sattler & Tom Battin in this story about life in Earth's dying ice. www.the-scientist.com/the-ice-is-a...

Amazing dataset describing the metabolic profiles of 66 E. coli transporter knockouts by @sulheim.bsky.social with Peter Doubleday and @nzamboni.bsky.social. The tool, set up by @lambdapp.bsky.social and Eric Ulrich allows you to explore for yourself. Enjoy! Pre-print here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Colibactin-DNA interstrand crosslinks structure reveals DNA-damaging acitivity of colibactin that is linked to colorectal cancer #MicroSky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/9 Just out: k-mer indexes are the backbone of fast search in genomic data, but many degrade under small k, subsampling, or high diversity. With Ondřej Sladký and @pavelvesely.bsky.social we asked: can we build one that works efficiently for any k-mer set?

Preprint out! Check out our new long-read metagenomic SNP-caller, SNooPy 😀. Work with Chris Quince. Thread 🧵 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧬🛡️How are new immune mechanisms created? We show how Lamassu antiphage system, originated from a DNA-repair complex and evolved into a compact and modular immune machine, wt Dinshaw Patel lab in @pnas.org. 👏 @matthieu-haudiquet.bsky.social, Arpita Chakravarti & all authors! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Optimized k-mer search across millions of bacterial genomes on laptops https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.23.690050v1

If you're about to push these last manuscripts before wrapping up 2025, remider that our MGen Eukaryotic collection @microbiologysociety.org is open & growing; #Protists #Parasites #Fungi; friend or foe; all welcome 😊 #MicroSky #IDSky #Protistsonsky 🧬💻 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/micr...

Really pleased to share the first paper to come out of the lab. We found that hospital patients were frequently colonised with P. aeruginosa and that the same clone was shared between the gut and the lung. The phylogenies indicate that the clones moved from lung->gut www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#microsky #phagesky #phage Anyone who’s tried deleting prophages in the lab by HR knows the difficulties of the task. Here we have an example of how HR-mediated natural transformation might hit the same hurdle in a more native context. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very happy to see this piece out in @plosbiology.org, on the bacterial immune systems and microbial communities. It was a great team effort with Rafael Custodio, @brockhurstlab.bsky.social , @brownlab.bsky.social, and Edze Westra! 🦠🧫 #phagesky #mevosky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Happy to share our new AMR resource which has phenotypic AMR (usually MIC data) collected from publications and databases. This is paired with assemblies and annotations We're excited for users who might train new models, find phenotype/genotype mismatches, or any other use

@wytamma.bsky.social : so, it took a little bit of extra time (not the flight back from the CZI meeting), but I decided to just f#&$ing do it, and the basic code to build and parse with the auxiliary fastq index is working (github.com/COMBINE-lab/...). 1/2

New preprint: we looked into production of the bacterial toxin colibactin and found that MDR E. coli from the global north have co-evolved with endemic colibactin producers, acquiring colibactin resistance genes before undergoing clonal expansions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint: we looked into production of the bacterial toxin colibactin and found that MDR E. coli from the global north have co-evolved with endemic colibactin producers, acquiring colibactin resistance genes before undergoing clonal expansions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My account's upload and bulk download access were terminated permanently in 2021 without explanation after I published *checksums* of GISAID genomes. GISAID and its SAB have since ignored a dozen emails seeking explanation. 4 yrs on, even Nextstrain has lost access. GISAID has rotted from its core.

The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say. Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA#microbiome @wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social

Metagenomics colleagues! I'm looking for studies where both Illumina and ONT sequencing were performed on the same samples from soil, human, ruminent, and other sample types for comparison. Bonus if those studies include PacBio data. Please help and share!

‘Wider humanities & social science fields are underrepresented; communities… are often not centred; and these perspectives are often only included after key research decisions have already been made.’ Excellent ‘genomics in context’ call from @wellcometrust.bsky.social wellcome.org/research-fun...

The solutions of the past 3 decades have failed to change the incentives of #PublishOrPerish. As a result, researcher funding, time, control, and trust has been lost. The ONE CONSTANT in the wake of the serial crisis, #PlanS and #OpenAccess reform has been publish profit margins. 2/n

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

🌍Open call: Junior Group Leader positions! Join a world-class biomedical research institute at the heart of the Vienna BioCenter, where curiosity drives discovery. Lead your own lab, pursue bold ideas, and shape the future of science at the IMP: www.imp.ac.at/career/open-...

Strain displacement in microbiomes via ecological competition Cool @natmicrobiol.nature.com publication by @erikbakkeren.bsky.social @vit-pi.bsky.social @meganleeny.bsky.social @microscape.bsky.social & Kevin Foster www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you're interested in using pangenome graphs for comparative genomics, check out my webinar, part of EMBL-EBI's "Concepts, methods, and resources in pangenomics" series, available on-demand: www.ebi.ac.uk/training/eve...

E. coli can spread as quickly as swine flu, new research reveals. 🦠 For the first time, scientists can predict the rate at which gut bacteria pass between people — a major step towards tackling antibiotic-resistant infections. Read here ⤵️ sanger.ac.uk/news_item/ad...

This. Also: We’ve no idea how much groundbreaking research we might actually be missing out on when core research doesn’t have the opportunity to gradually unfold, take place without being tailored to surface claims about high impact and fantastic deliverables.

So happy to share this! Bacteriocins were first discovered over 100 years ago, but what do they actually do? We look at >1000 bacteriocin plasmids and find links to virulence and antimicrobial resistance, and frequent bacteriocin sharing in Enterobacteriaceae. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

🔊 Applications for the tenure-track illuminate global challenge fellowships at Queen’s are now open! Comes with 5 years protected research time, a PhD studentship, & 60k start-up. I had one of these before getting my FLF, happy to chat to anyone interested! www.qub.ac.uk/Research/fel...

🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"? It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.” I took its claims seriously. The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

Looks like OpenFold3 has been formally released in a public "preview". Not quite on parity with AlphaFold3 on a few benchmarks shown, in particular for antibody interactions. All info on the github link. I am sure we will hear more about this from the developers github.com/aqlaboratory...

1/6 Movi 2 is here: faster and more space-efficient for pangenome queries. Its fastest mode uses half the memory of Movi 1 while running ~30% faster. github.com/mohsenzakeri...

This particular figure was quite striking - physical microscopy of the E. coli genome. Somehow we run these tangles mess through pores (often not breaking them over significant distances) and render them into reliable representation of whole genomic compartments. 🧫🦠