Did someone say Asgard? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hungary 1956 'Well over a 100k people fled the country seeking asylum. Among them was a young geneticist named George Rédei, who headed for the Austrian border with a small vial of seeds tucked in his pocket. The seeds belonged to a spindly weed in the mustard family called Arabidopsis thaliana.'

An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It’s really remarkable how thin the bench of climate change deniers is and how deep the poverty of their arguments. They haven’t come up with anything new in decades and can only fall back on conspiracies to explain their lack of success.

🚨vConTACT3 preprint live!🚨(Peer Review soon...!) vConTACT3 delivers a unified, scalable, and transparent framework for genome-based virus taxonomy — helping translate big viral data into systematic classification. 🔗 Read the preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Improvements details below 👇

Our method for genome size estimation from long-read overlaps is now published 🥳 academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Bacteria can sense when a virus starts shredding their genome — by detecting methylated mononucleotides. Here’s the story of how we discovered the Metis defense system 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Newly released Stockholm Declaration recommends the following reforms to publishing: 1. Academia resumes control of publishing 2. Incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity 3. Independent fraud detection and prevention 4. Legislation and policies to protect science quality and integrity

After 5 years of waiting, the new #CRISPR classification by Makarova et al. is out @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Amazing paper, especially love this figure of what differentiates broad host range phages: especially Diversity Generating Retroelements and multiple methyltransferases

🚨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...

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

If you work with or rely on academic journals - don't miss this strange, funny, horrifying story about what happened when @carloschaccour.bsky.social published a paper on a malaria breakthrough in a prestigious journal – and AI came for the letters page. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/s...

How's this for energy abundance? Millions of Aussies will start receiving three hours of free power each day in 2026. This is what happens when you make rooftop solar less than a buck a watt!! "Rooftop solar installations cost about $840 (U.S.) per kilowatt of capacity before rebates." 🤯 🔌💡

3. It confirms the prediction we made in our 2011 paper that Naomiviridae are far more ubiquitous than the previous metagenomic data would suggest, exactly because of the underrepresentation of phages with modified DNA. cc @bejalab.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚨 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...

We found that overall virus-community diversity remains stable, but individual populations show clear diel and depth-linked shifts, with distinct viral archetypes peaking at day or night. Read the full story on BioRxiv: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Lead author: Alfonso Carrillo

That's a 636 vote difference. Very happy to have donated to John McAuliff, thanks to @climatecabinet.org If you'd like to make an impact, consider supporting 2026 local races with big outcomes for climate policy through climatecabinet.org. Each dollar goes further www.fauquier.com/elections/br...

A thread about keeping one’s head above water under the current conditions and not being incapacitated by rage, fear, despair or some mixture of those (1/11)

Public Utilities Commissioners are climate policymakers and we finally started acting like it

🧬 🦠 🏙️ Urban vs rural lifestyles create dramatically different gut microbiomes. But how do these different gut microbiomes affect the host? Excited to share our new paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

OMG. Arena BioWorks, an ambitious biomedical institute backed by billionaires, abruptly shuts down www.statnews.com/2025/11/04/a... via @statnews.com

🏆 Victory! Alicia Johnson just brought home the win for clean energy and lower costs. Let’s keep building a brighter future at the Georgia PSC! 🌞

Great win. Here's why it mattered: www.volts.wtf/p/pay-attent...

Some good news: Brazil's fight against deforestation is paying climate dividends.

1/ It is my pleasure to share the latest preprint of the team: "Symbiotic diversification relies on an ancestral gene network in plants" doi.org/10.1101/2025... Here, we identified and functionally validated a novel master regulator of intracellular symbioses! A thread ... #PlantScience

See ya folks, 2009 was a better place and I just got my invite to go back

As our beloved Genome Informatics 2025 (#gi2025) approaches, I'm moved to share some photos from past years at CSHL. A couple more photos coming in a reply below...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Has anyone grappled with a future of IP in biotech when sufficiently sequence diverse binders can be generated for a given target? Will patents try to cover the process of binder design for a given target itself? Run big design campaigns to try to saturate sample the space of possible binders?

There has been a lot of recent interest in mitigating "super pollutants", short-lived climate pollutants like methane and refrigerants. We should cut emissions, but using them as carbon offsets risks breaking the math of net zero: www.theclimatebrink....

So lets take stronger action to cut SLCPs; lets just not do it in a framework that allows more CO2 emissions. Because ultimately its CO2 that is driving long-term warming of the climate system. SLCP's alone cannot credibly neutralize CO2 emissions; they need to be coupled with future carbon removal.

📢 We’re hiring! The DSMZ is looking for a Scientific Lead for the SILVA Database — a unique opportunity to shape one of the world’s most important scientific resources for microbial taxonomy and ecology. Apply now and help us shape the future of microbial research. 👉 www.dsmz.de/dsmz/career/...

Last night, Illinois passed two of the biggest pro-climate laws of 2025 In the final day of session, lawmakers voted for $1.5B in annual transit funding and passed the Clean & Reliable Grid Act By passing these pro-affordability, pro-climate bills, they've shown what’s possible when states lead 🧵

Our latest work on the nitrogenase-like methylthio-alkane reductase, which specifically reduces reduces carbon-sulfide bonds is now out @natcatal.nature.com: doi.org/10.1038/s419.... We find for the first time large #nitrogenase metalloclusters (P- and L-cluster) outside nitrogenases.

Utterly bizarre to describe climate change policy as some kind of radical-left albatross. The IRA contained precisely the kind of 'kitchen table' programs everyone says Democrats should focus on — and they're popular! The problem was that Americans *didn't know* what the IRA was or who passed it.

You guys they did it! They passed a major grid upgrades bill and SAVED TRANSIT with a $1.3b reform package! Nice work Illinois! So proud of the @climatecabinet.org team's work in the coalition to help get this done!

For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.

Excited to share: DNA glycosylases are diverse antiviral effectors. They recognize phage base modifications and initiate genome destruction. A structure‑guided approach made the scope of this discovery possible! 🧪 #phagesky doi.org/10.1101/2025... #phage #microbiology

We also detected all of the other human coronaviruses, and influenza viruses. They all were most prevalent January-March, as expected. 10/

We are not the first group to do unbiased sequencing of wastewater to monitor circulating viruses, but I think we are the first to ever do it at this scale. Weekly wastewater samples for 18 months, totaling over 85 Billion sequence reads. 2/

Traffic deaths are a societal choice We decide we’re OK with such deaths or we’re not OK In 1975, Oslo had 44 traffic deaths—now they have zero deaths per year Oslo made a choice. It had a vision of zero deaths, & chose to take the steps needed to end deaths (www.wired.com/story/oslo-p...)

I've been asked about this paper (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) enough times that I finally had to read it. The basic claim is that mRNA vaccines had huge synergistic benefit with checkpoint blockade against lung cancer melanoma. tl;dr it's glam-slop & everyone involved should be embarrassed

I wanted to offer some thoughts on the Gates climate memo that has been circulating this week. While I can't directly speak for others, I can say that my own response is one of dismay & deep frustration (and that this view is shared by many climate/Earth scientists). [1/n]

I can't wait for the day that I see a paper entitled "One health papers on AMR are a major source of AMR"

The collateral benefits of the Covid pandemic response was a marked decrease in airborne and aerosol-transmitted infections via masking and non-pharmaceutical interventions @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#phagesky #phage defence #microsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some optimism from Bill Gates’s latest note — between 2014-2024, innovation led to a 40% cut in projected emissions. Fingers crossed the Trump will not succeed in reversing this progress.

@prczhaoyansong.bsky.social’s deep dive into the dark matter of compost communities is now out 🎉 Genomic islands hijack jumbo phages—whose capsids enable transfer of large tracts of DNA—shedding new light on the scale & scope of phage-mediated gene flow 😎 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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.