When you use AI to do your writing, you are telling your audience: “I deserve your attention, but you do not deserve my effort.”

I believe the frame that minoritized scholars are helped by unethical tech is a trap to avoid. We better fight the system of inequities ourselves & not buy into industry frames trying to sell their discriminatory, polluting, and exploitative tech as "inclusion". bsky.app/profile/iris...

“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...

Friday was my last day at NHGRI. After 10 wonderful years, my lab is headed to Johns Hopkins University genomeinformatics.github.io/movingday/

Budding infectious disease modellers: We're running our intermediate-level infectious disease modelling short courses at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Each course is 4 days, and we're running them over the first two weeks of September.

In case anyone thought “Nature” Scientific Reports was still a legit journal…

thinking a lot about this cartoon this week... WHY DID I AGREE TO THOSE REVIEWS??

Excited to share our new paper out today in @science.org 🎉 We show that HGT via natural competence drives diversification of chromosomal integrons in V. cholerae 🤩 Below a 🧵 on key findings incl. background on natural competence in V. cholerae 1/ #microsky #phagesky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reviewers! They're just like us!

The way I usually frame this is that while "AI can be incredibly powerful in the hands of experts, it won't make anybody an expert". It's important to understand the difference and it's why Altman's comment that ChatGPT was like having a "Ph.D. level experts in your pocket" is total hyped nonsense.

Did you know? 🧵 1/3

New blogpost by @deevybee.bsky.social on Wellcome LEAP's $50 million program on autism and the microbiome deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/03/upda...

Interesting. www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

how cool would it be if we had different words for "incredibly computationally intense and kinda troubling but startlingly effective coding tools seeing massive uptake", "dumb UI shit nobody asked for polluting everything", "cheating helper", and "computer program for identifying bird calls or wev"

Now published! 'Identification of transporter-dependent capsular loci associated with the invasive potential of Escherichia coli' www.nature.com/articles/s41... insights below.....

No wonder institutions, and whole countries, are refusing to pay exorbitant fees to Elsevier to access this utter nonsense

Oh nothing, just a peer reviewed paper my colleagues found... doi.org/10.1016/j.ma... "1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min." Even AI knows what's wrong here, but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social doesn't.

Congratulation to the newly elected members of the European Academy of Microbiology! Lots of friends among the lot, which includes @plosbiology.org academic editors @katholt.bsky.social @sophiemartinlab.bsky.social and Arjan de Visser 🎉🧪#Microsky #Virosky fems-microbiology.org/european-aca...

@lshtm.bsky.social launches its new MRes in Infectious & Tropical Diseases, a research-focused Master’s. It is based within LSHTM’s Faculty of Infectious & Tropical Disease. Strong option for intercaled students. More details here: www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/course...

Really pleased to see our work (LIN codes developed for high-resolution typing of meningococci) has been directly utilised in the @ukhsa.bsky.social meningococcal disease outbreak technical briefing

Welcome, @stephlo.bsky.social, our new Team Leader for Protein Function. Find out how Stephanie’s experience in genomics shaped her approach to protein curation and AI integration. #ProteinScience #AI www.embl.org/news/people-...

If you would like to learn more about Dr. Senjuti Saha’s 2026 Sabin Rising Award, read the full story in our press release: chrfbd.org/blogs/0deb2c...

1/ Dr. Senjuti Saha has been announced as the 2026 Sabin Rising Star Awardee! She is the first South Asian to receive this honour - what a proud moment for Bangladesh and the Child Health Research Foundation!

Pleased to share our new preprint on genomic epi of #treponema www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... focusing on genomic diversity and transmission of #syphilis in Africa with @drmichaelmarks.bsky.social @sangerinstitute.bsky.social @thruzim.bsky.social and many others

Excited to announce our new journal from @isme-microbes.bsky.social ISME Host Microbe is live and now accepting submissions. Look forward to receiving your papers! #Microsky 🧫 🦠

Awesome, stupid AI bubble means my students can’t have laptops

New research article Lineage dynamics of invasive Escherichia coli isolates in the Netherlands from 1975 to 2021: a retrospective longitudinal genomic analysis www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... #IDSky #ClinMicro #AMR #OpenAccess #OA

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

May someone accuse each and every one of the Republicans voting for this of being the wrong gender when going pee? Then demand the police check and prove they are/aren't? I think that'd be fair to do every last time they try to go to the bathroom.

📣 The Whelan lab is hiring a bioinformatics postdoc 📣 Together with @fabricejpierre.bsky.social, we are offering a 1-year bioinformatic PDRA position in comparative genomics of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. To find out more please visit whelanlab.co.uk/contact/. Applications close 3 April 2026!

Worried about the #meningitis outbreak in the UK? I've answered some common questions in this @uk.theconversation.com article: theconversation.com/two-people-h... #immunosky #microsky 🧪

I don’t understand the rationale for this. And I’ve seen first hand how some places are really ‘on it’ with regard to interview practice because they have successful prior candidates or folk on the committee whereas others aren’t. It has the potential to disadvantage some institutions.

1/ 🦟 Big news: #Pathoplexus now supports Dengue virus & Yellow Fever virus - two arboviruses responsible for over 400 million infections and up to 94,000 deaths per year. Here's what’s new in our latest update 👇🏻 Read the full update: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-03... 📰

Opening for a tenure track position in statistical computing: wirtschaftsuniversitaet-wien-portal.rexx-systems.com/Assistant-Pr... As dept chair, R Core member Kurt Hornik invites applications from people who could make substantial contributions to #RStats, including base R. Deadline Mar 18!

My employer asks me to complete a survey on AI usage for which this is the first question (required):

This is all so easily verifiable by adequate editorial checks. What is the point of a journal if they can’t even check that references are real? Easy cheap solution - make authors provide DOI or ISBN for every ref, and check these exist and titles match. Free referencing software does this already…

🦠 “𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀 — 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄?” Historian @kirchhelle.bsky.social chats with 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗮 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗲 & 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗘𝗯𝗱𝗲𝗻 about revival of phage biology & phage therapy as antibiotics fail. 🎧 2024 BBC Radio 4 — listen worldwide: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... #phage #phagesky #microsky

Dear Shabana, Let's clear some things up around migration and remember we're talking about people's lives.

I’m seeing lots of clickbait articles along the lines ‘your WFH coworkers are not really working, they’re doing laundry & spending Fridays at the pub’… I mean maybe in some jobs where management has no idea what people actually do? 🤷‍♀️ But it is nonsense in an academic setting.

Fungal genome sequencing for free! 👇🏼 #GGFungi2026

Any recommendations for books / vids for little ones interested to learn about microbiology? My 5yo has picked up on work chatter and keeps asking “Tell me about Klebsiella?” and I am running out of ideas! 😂 #MicroSky

AI has huge promise for genomics -- but it has consistently failed at microbiome-based prediction. My new post on why simple models keep winning, where deep learning actually earns its place, and where the field is headed blekhman.substack.com/p/ai-keeps-f...

I love this spring weather ☀️🌷 but yikes I can feel the histamine pumping thru me!! 🤧

The first version of FigTree was released nearly 20 years ago and it is still widely used (including by me). But there are currently 85 issues on the GitHub repo (github.com/rambaut/figt...) and some of them I don’t really like the look of.

When even the AI company CEOs say “what you want is unethical and a bad idea”, it’s time to sit the fuck down and have a serious think about what you wanted.

In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication. We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #CodeSharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing.

📢 We want your feedback on our new pilot project for sharing AI models in life science research. Finding, reusing and citing machine learning models remains a major challenge in the life sciences. BioAIrepo is here to help. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t...

Courtesy of @martibartfast.bsky.social , we have a new release of AllTheBacteria which adds another 322,920 assemblies, covering all ENA (illumina, isolate) prokaryotes to May 2025. allthebacteria.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ov...

@wytamma.bsky.social 's WASM tools have transformed my experience of teaching Python to first year undergraduate biologists this year. Since last year, I've been teaching ~400 undergrads how to code (functions, lists, dictionaries, loops) over (one hour intro lecture +) two 2-hour practicals. 1/n