I am thrilled to share our story online at @cellpress.bsky.social . Big thanks to all authors: Zhiping, Bill, @lubanlab.bsky.social, Keith & bluesky-less! authors.elsevier.com/c/1kjdaL7PXu... How to tame a genome invader? It takes wild koalas 🐨🐨 to learn it. #Retrovirus #koala #piRNA More below 👇

Keep speaking up because it matters. Call out inhumane policies that will kill people. PEPFAR funded HIV drug distribution resumes...for now. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/h...

"MFSD6 is an entry receptor for respiratory enterovirus D68" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lots of new viruses (and other known pathogens) here, especially in carnivores and rodents. Of most interest, a bi-segmented coronavirus sampled from diseased red (lesser) pandas (Ailurus fulgens) and that represents a new genus. Work led my Mang Shi and Shuo Su. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Five years ago (Saturday 11 Jan 2020), first public announcement and availability of a sequence of the new coronavirus. It was posted by @eddieholmes.bsky.social at 01:05 UTC on Virological, and announced on Twitter at 01:08 UTC. ▫️1/ web.archive.org/web/20200118... archive.is/z880d

Recently: - a severe case of H5N1 infection in British Columbia (required ICU, now recovered) - a lethal case in Louisiana. Features of the Flu sequences from both patients: - closest to flu found in birds - HA mutations likely to be adaptations to humans www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spo...

Five years ago (Sunday 5 Jan 2020), scientists in Zhang YongZhen's group in Shanghai obtained their first sequence of the new virus, from samples obtained outside of the official national protocol. They submitted it to GenBank with an embargo. ▫️1/ www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN90...

“The beauty of mRNA is the ability within a moment’s notice to change the vaccine.” time.com/7203820/h5n1...

The Outbreak of human metapneumovirus in China has caused a bit of a stir . It is not a novel virus but seems to be causing a significant outbreak coinciding with the winter. HMPV, was discovered in 2001 in the Netherlands. www.newsweek.com/human-metapn...

Do you know where transcription of a gene actually stops? Hint: it is not the annotated gene end. In our new paper in Nucleic Acids Research we argue that phosphorylation on threonine 4 of RNA Pol II CTD is a marker of transcription termination in animals... 🧵 academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

This looks like it could be very useful! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Case report of 13 year old in British Columbia with H5N1 infection. Progression in one day from left-sided pneumonia to complete lung involvement (see chest x-rays) www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Cool paper on broadening anti-influenza immune response to vax: - human data: twins, newborns, & tonsil organoid; & mouse data - Host genetics > original antigenic sin - Covalent coupling of diverse HAs decreases anti-HA antibody strain bias, probably via T cell help www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Five years ago (Monday 30 Dec 2019), a turning point: the news of an outbreak in Wuhan spread on messaging apps, social media (Weibo, then Twitter), and got out of China, culminating with a ProMED alert sent to the international medical community on 30-31 Dec. ▫️1/

I’m looking for a postdoc to join my team under a recently funded ERC Starting Grant. If you’re passionate about structural #virology and have experience in #cryoEM SPA and/or #cryoET, get in touch! Application deadline: January 19th. Please share with your networks 🙏 Job link: tiny.cc/7v33001

1/ 🎄 What’s the best gift under the tree for a computational biologist? 🎁 A new experimental assay that refines our view of gene regulation: ACCESS-ATAC! This creative idea from Richard Sherwood was developed collaboratively between his lab and mine. #Genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

You don't say... The price of eggs will define 2025. I am calling it 😏 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...

Thomas Pindani Nyalile defended his Ph.D. thesis today: "Regulation of HIV-1 gene expression, provirus reactivation, and replication dynamics by EIF3H" Congrats Dr. Nyalile!!! Next Spring he'll be heading back to Tanzania to do some molecular biology:

It is a first such case in the US, and of course scary, especially for the patient, but not a harbinger of a change in the virus. The person had exposure to sick birds. This is not infection with the dairy cow virus. www.cdc.gov/media/releas...

We discovered the source of the super high tech multicolored drones: Veggie Galaxy on Mass Ave near MIT (so obvious once you think of it)

~40 non-human primates have their own SIVs/lentis/immunodef viruses. For ex, SIVsyke’s monkey, or SIVmandrill, all structurally similar to HIV-1

The ICTV Lentivirus classification is flawed. Lentivirus humimdef1 (HIV-1) is not monophyletic (i.e. multiple jumps), nor is Lentivirus simimdef (SIV), and whereas HIV-1 has a single host and originated quite recently, SIV infects diverse primate species and is 1000s of years old. AKA inconsistent.

Here is why it is incorrect to blame the US response to the #H5N1 outbreak in dairy cattle for the human case in British Columbia: they are unrelated. H5N1 is diverse, and the genotype involved in the dairy cattle outbreak is not the same as the one collected in BC nextstrain.org/avian-flu/h5...

Agree! Huge scientific breakthrough - now we need global access to see the real change happen!

Video recording of 2024 MassCPR Symposium is online Yoshihiro Kawaoka, Eva Harris, JJ Stone, David Bean, Shira Weingarten-Gabbay, Wanyu Li, Milky Abajorga, Erika Weiskopf UMadison/Tokyo, Berkeley, UMass, Harvard, Tufts, Boston Univ, MIT, Broad masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/masscpr-symp...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Our study published today on #bioRxiv describe the identification of a deaminase that converts 5mC to T, enabling direct sequencing of the human methylome and genome. This achievement was made possible through a collaborative effort across all departments at #NEB.

Congratulations Dr Victoria Hogan, shown presenting her PhD thesis acknowledgments, @bostoncollege.bsky.social mentor Welkin Johson looking on. She discovered that the immunosuppressive domain of gammaretroviral type Envs stabilizes a transient conformational state required for host cell entry.

1. #Flu update: #CDC posted FluView today, for the week ending Nov. 23. It shows that though flu activity is still relatively low, the season is starting. The crosscountry travel & multigenerational gatherings over Thanksgiving will likely have amped transmission up further.

We’re entering flu season with bird flu raging among US dairy cattle: ~third of CA herds infected. The danger is flu viruses have a trick: they can swap segments —one farmworker co-infected by human and avian flu— to cause pandemics. We may get lucky. I hope so. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/o...

Explore our December issue! 🔍Searching for avian influenza virus in Antarctica 🌡️Microbes against climate catastrophe ☕️Coffee shapes gut communities 💊Parkinson’s drug starves gut microbes of iron Read it here: www.nature.com/nmicrobiol/v...

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist” James Baldwin

Check out our work that aims to decipher Cryptococcus neoformans on an global scale. 4300 knockout strains, 142 genetic screens, 6 in depth follow up stories (too many to summarize here, but rach is cool!). AlphaFold, AP-MS, microscopy, secretomics, mice, machine learning and more.

Been down so long (from social media), it (bsky) looks like up to me - Furry Lewis