Welcome to our lab Dylan Kwan, a coop exchange student from Simon Fraser University in Canada!

My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)

Congratulations to Wei Hao and our own postdoctoral Fish Hui Xian Poh for winning the best poster award at this year’s Singapore Scientific Conference!

Weekend in Tokyo ahead of meeting up with colleagues.

Congratulations to our phd student Thomas for winning the best poster prize at the Pasteur Cambodia Immunology course!!

Who remembers sequencing their molecular cloning experiments by hand and eye?!? Running your own acrylamide gels and reading the four bases from top to bottom of gel, to only get 200 nt read from a single mini prep hoping your insert was ok!?

Happening now! Prof Yue WANG, our pillar of Fungal biology at ASTAR ID Labs, is celebrating over 4 decades of research in his last seminar before retirement. What a great life story!

This was an excellent talk by a brilliant scientist, Kei Sato, from University of Tokyo, opening up a second satellite lab at Duke-NUS! Great news for Singapore virology!

Tomorrow at IDLabs! 10am in Matrix building, Codon room Seminar by Kei Sato!

This explains the recent outbreak of arts and crafts in @astar-idlabs.bsky.social @vignuzzilab.bsky.social @alnajifg.bsky.social

This week, my lab, and research institute A*IDL, and A*STAR signed an ideation agreement with Flagship Pioneering Biotech and one of their portfolio companies Apriori to develop self-amplifying RNA vaccines for pandemic Flu threats. (1/3)

Sharing this, quite relevant this week. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Szarina brought in virus snowflake cutout-yourself printouts to prepare for the Singapore winter and Christmas!

Today we had a computational virology workshop with Profs. Veronika Bernhauerova (Charles University Czechia) and Bartek Lisowski (Jagiellonian University Krakow, Dr. Spyros Lytras (Univ Tokyo) and Cedric Tan (UCL Crick Institute). 4 hours of chit chat and coming up with ways to collaborate.

Afternoon coffee break at Top Coffee Shop in Asia, number 6 in the world, dunno who’s list but must be an important one: Apartment Cafe. With Veronika Bernhauerova from Charles University Czechia and Bartek Lisowski of Jagiellonian University in Krakow Poland.

First big piece of research from our SG lab: Fadi's work with Chris Brooke's lab. Flu serially passaged 80X selects a defective genome with improved competition, but is nonviable as a full virus! Notable improvement & safety for DVGs as antiviral RNA therapies! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Welcome to our lab Mingcong (Albert) to our lab! Albert is from Chengdu China and will be an intern in our lab for the next seven months working with Fadi Alnaji.

Happy Diwali Happy Deepavali To all celebrating in Singapore and beyond!

Be positive. Love thyself. Try to love others too.

Happening now. Prof. Kartik Chandran, in Singapore this week for the HCV & Flaviviruses conference, is speaking to ID Labs scientists on their coronavirus research.

🦠 "Social Virology at the Tri-Kingdom Interface in Birds and Mammals" 🐥 We have a new 4y (open to intl students) PhD project advertised through the NorthWestBio Doctoral Training Partnership (lnkd.in/ee8hRpN6 ) between QUBelfast and Lancaster on virus-bacterial interactions across vertebrates!

Had a reminder by my colleague Amit Singhal that two years ago to this day our faculty had a retreat in my medieval village of Noyers-sur-Serein. Missing this clunky old house! 🏰 ❤️

New #QVEU preprint! @williambakhache.bsky.social used our #EV71 mutational scanning library to dissect replication complex function with a collection of inhibitors against specific host and viral factors. Then used the data to validate structural predictions! Super cool #virosky #virus #evolution

Very cool paper that I presented to journal club today by Singer et al, by Tal Danino and Charlie Rice labs. I LOVE this paper! rdcu.be/eH4le As a postdoc in Andino lab 20 years ago, we took a similar strategy to deliver recombinant RNA viruses or saRNA by intracellular S. typhimurium.

Lab 🌈 at @astar-idlabs.bsky.social annual retreat at Universal Studios Singapore! What’s your colour? Where’s your pot of gold?

My lab found me in my hiding spot when I try to avoid responsibilities. Back to work.

Interested in attending the EMBO Lecture Course, entitled "RNA virus infection and host immune responses," hosted in Faridabad, India, on 11 – 14 February 2026? sign up here: meetings.embo.org/event/26-rna...

Congratulations to Jolene Fu from the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. Today she defended her PhD thesis on COVID immune escape and evolution. Excellent dissertation and oral defence. Dr. Jolene Fu, PhD!

Immigrant to new Citizens, 1977-1980, Canada. Our Citizenship photos. Why was my photo different? Always the odd one out!

Welcome to Paul Foucambert! Paul is an MD from France, seeking experience in biomedical sciences, and will be part of our Vignuzzi lab family for the next three years developing new vaccine strategies, learning about molecular virology and sharing his medical and clinical insights. Welcome Paul!

Welcome Dariel Tanoto to our lab! Dariel is a Research Officer that will be working with our postdoctoral scientist Fish Poh on new RNA therapeutics. And with that we can add 🇮🇩 to our lab flags!

ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Paolo, the computational biologist in my group, leads me into research fields I thought I never thought I'd see. It was nice to be part of this work from different ASTAR teams in food sciences!

South East Asian Tick-borne Diseases symposium is happening now at NUS in Singapore.

Dr. Gamou Fall visited A*IDL today to present research by her Yellow Fever reference center and the WHO center for arboviruses and hemorrhagic fevers at Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal. Setting up new collaborations between Singapore and Senegal.

Last day at @vignuzzilab.bsky.social ! Leaving in The Office style. Been a fruitful journey and definitely grew me scientifically🧬🔬!

Faculty search announcement 2025: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Microbiology at UT Southwestern. We seek candidates working in microbial pathogenesis (some preference may be given to bacterial pathogens). Come join our community! (1/5) www.utsouthwestern.edu/departments/...

What a dynamic team they make! This was the official send off for Cornelius heading to Oxford University for his PhD!

Joined yet another gym! If you are looking for a bright gym, with top notch equipment, and not too busy in the morning, try Max Out Fitness in Raffles Quay. Other location at 313 Somerset. If you’re into Hyrox, it trains those folks in the evenings and weekends. Stay fit!

A PEARL w/ @astar-idlabs.bsky.social PhD student Xiangyu Sui #IDsky #microsky #immunsky "Animal models of Mycobacterium abscessus pulmonary infection phenotypes: What are we modeling?" We propose Mabs infection is more than one disease and requires more than one model 1/3 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Happy birthday to Fish and Thomas! Both are wise old souls in young bodies. Although both bodies are older today! 🍰 🎉

0 to 60 ! Happy birthday to Earth’s little miracle. Happy to call Singapore home! 🙏

Happy birthday to ShuLing. She is AMAZING. Her work. Perfect. Her character. Even better. And she is so funny, she fills you with joy!

I spoke to the new class of ASTAR Graduate Academy scholars. They are offered fully paid PhD anywhere in the world! a great way to build up Singapore's next generation of scientists! My role was to promote studying in Canada, US, France and rest of Europe, giving my personal experiences in each.

Smiling because Singapore is such a great place to be. Disguising as corporate Marco today.

Killer pug in vet office.

Dress up day at ASTAR. Corporate photo shoot means video search “how to tie a tie” and “which button do you button up”

Join me and many colleagues from around the world for this EMBO course on RNA viruses, in India this Feb 11-14 2026! meetings.embo.org/event/26-rna...

Fantastic postdoc fellowship opportunity @mcgill.ca! mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...

"Going to be 15min late for lab meeting, sorry! Please start without me" received this message and video this morning Singapore street fights and traffic jams: