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...

If you are looking for a PhD in the UK, please check out the LIDo program - www.lido-dtp.ac.uk/apply. If you are interested in viruses and making genetically edited salmon, please look up my icase project. International students are welcome to apply! Please reach out if you have questions.

Our new preprint is out 🥳🥳🥳 Henipaviruses, like Nipah and Hendra, package their genomes inside helical shells built by thousands of nucleoproteins. These nucleocapsids are essential to protect the viral RNA, but how do they ever let the polymerase in to read the sequence? 👇

Guys- new spillover route just dropped.

warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa... I am advertising for a PhD position in my group. We'll be investigating how pathogenic RNA viruses replicate in the nucleus. The project will teach cryoEM/ET, virus culture, and in vitro assays. If you're interested reach out and I'd be happy to have a chat.

🧵🚨 The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news. Today our report is published! www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n... 1/11

Excited to share that our paper on the relationship between viral load and metagenomic outputs in wildlife samples is now published in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety! 🎉 Fantastic collaboration with a brilliant team. More info: 📖 tinyurl.com/ywb7tvjm

In new study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social, we provide near real-time data on human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza by measuring ~26,000 titers to >100 recent viral strains Data can inform vaccine selection & evolutionary/epidemiological modeling www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In under 24h following the newly identified outbreak of #Ebola in the DRC, the virus has been isolated, sequenced and the virus sequence data made publicly available. virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

About time!

Really excited to have been a part of this study, lead by @willharv.bsky.social on how reassortment of H5N1 in birds has lead to a 'specialist' genotype that thrives in seabirds and drives summer/spring (rather than winter) waves of poultry outbreaks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We have a new research assistant role co-supervised with @cjohansson-lab.bsky.social Working on #vaccines and #immunology www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOH045/r... @imperialmed.bsky.social

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

Want to move to Switzerland? We are looking for a postdoc to study airborne viruses: careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne... @linseymarr.bsky.social @lakdawalalab.bsky.social @corsiaq.bsky.social @influenzal.bsky.social @chuckhaas.bsky.social

This is quite late but our lab has a preprint out about a SARS-CoV-2 situation we had in mink in Lithuania back in 2021. It's a doozy with re-emergence of extinct lineages, a country-wide test of all mink farms in Lithuania & some interesting dynamics in mink. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/5🧵

Something a little different. If you're looking for interesting science to engage with older school children, I would like to plug my students' work on cow flu - where it came from and what risk it might pose. doi.org/10.1042/bio_... PS> Not peer reviewed but was fun to help write!

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Latest preprint from the lab, many years in the making! By combining #cryoEM with #AlphaFold3 modelling, we propose that norovirus NS3 forms a transmembrane RNA translocase. This could have big implications for our understanding of viral replication & assembly (🧵) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to present the first review from my lab! Which mutations allow H5 influenza to jump into humans or other mammals? How close is H5 to a pandemic? This review has the answers and explains the molecular mechanism behind the mutations. Led by @fcapelastegui.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1099/jgv....

This is a really friendly meeting for influenza virologists. Great for PhD students and anyone else working on flu.

Should you drink flu-infected raw milk? Obviously no but now you can put numbers on how bad an idea this is.

Finishing virology/biology PhD students, postdocs in need of a job- this is a lab you should join! Am I biased? 100% yes- because I know that the Sheppard lab will be an awesome place to work and you'll do great science. Spread the word!

We are currently seeking an ambitious, motivated, and hard-working scientist to join my lab (wrobel-lab.org) at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Oxford as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. If interested, please go here directly: tinyurl.com/postdoc-wrob... or read more below.

With NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya dismissing my reporting as "false" and "spreading rumors" hours before releasing a policy that confirmed said "rumors," I feel compelled to respond. Here's an inside look into how this story was reported. It was a weird one. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We're looking for a PhD student to join us at Vilnius University in Lithuania. We work on RNA virus evolution computationally but we'd like to generate more mosquito RNA virus sequence data. Official ad: www.gmc.vu.lt/en/doctoral-.... Please share & continue reading if interested.

Excited to share @joelrc.bsky.social 's new paper examining the factors underlying cell-to-cell heterogeneity in interferon induction during flu infection: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Do you remember BA.3—the weakling cousin of BA.1 & BA.2 that seemed to take the worst from each & had weaker ACE2 binding than even the ancestral Wuhan Virus? After three years, BA.3 is back. And it is transmitting. Who saw this coming? 1/13

1/46 Hey folks, we have a new paper out on the MuLTEE. Strap in and I’ll tell you the story of how this “little paper on polyploidy” turned into the most data rich paper our lab has produced, largely thanks to the leadership and work ethic of @kaitong25.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For something different... Happy to report the accepted version of our manuscript on H3N2 Canine Influenza Virus (CIV) in US dogs over the past 20 years, at Epidemiology & Infection (Cambridge). #influenza #virology www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Our analysis of the second incursion of H5N1 viruses (genotype D1.1) into dairy cattle in the US is now posted to virological virological.org/t/timing-and...

Core-funded postdoc position at The Pirbright Institute, Surrey, UK (just outside London), in the group of Professor Ian Brown. Working on H5N1 avian influenza virus evolution and development of cross-reactive vaccines. www.pirbright.ac.uk/careers-and-...

This is lightning striking twice. I was not expecting to see any more incursions from wild birds to cows but if it happened once, it can happen again. I would like to see the sequences asap to confirm what is happening here.

Well the award for most cowardly, boot-lickingest academic society has squarely gone to the American Society of Microbiology, who has taken down features of various non-white scientists. Absolutely pathetic behavior. Those articles are now coming up as “under review”. Truly sickening cowardice here.

Data on the CDC's website are being removed to comply with the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility, Katherine J. Wu reports:

Hi folks, I'm excited to share a whale of a tale (sorry, bad pun), where we engineer snowflake yeast to express sperm whale myoglobin, and explore how oxygen-binding proteins may have helped overcome anatomical limitations to early multicellularity. 🧪 #MEvoSky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This looks really cool. UK leading the way!

🎺 PhD studentship available at @lshtm.bsky.social and RVC! @influenzal.bsky.social and I are advertising for a project to investigate the unexpected phenomenon that mutagenic antiviral drugs can give rise to viruses with hundreds of mutations which are still viable. 🧵 www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

New paper alert!! 🚨🚨 And it's on the coolest (and most mysterious 🕵️) group of viruses I've worked on so far! With Sej Modha we uncovered >800 new anellovirus genomes from human metagenomes and looked for clues on these tiny, elusive viruses biology! academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

🚨 I'm delighted to announce a fully-funded PhD studentship (October 2025 entry) in collaboration with the Pirbright Institute. Are you interested in FMDV genome replication and packaging? Fascinated by structure and RNA-protein interactions? More info here: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Wendy Barclay and I are recruiting a postdoc for a project investigating the evolution of swine influenza viruses and how this impacts future pandemic potential. Job is based at Imperial's South Kensington campus. Drop me a DM/email for more details. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Start of the year lab meeting today. We had memes. Highly recommend this for every lab meeting. My students unsurprisingly came up with better ones than this.

Please share widely! We are recruiting a 3-year postdoc at the RVC to develop new methodology to infer epidemic dynamics from wild animal viromes sampled across changeable environments. Further details: jobs.rvc.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... Feel free to reach out with any questions. Deadline Feb 9th

🚨 New preprint alert 🚨 We searched for the presence of coronaviruses in >200 bat individuals across Spain 🦠🦇. We recovered 6 complete coronavirus genomes, including 3 novel species. One of them could use bat and human ACE2 for entry. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Since the USDA launched its Bird Flu milk testing strategy in December, 28 states have enrolled, representing nearly 65% of the nation’s milk production. And there's a dashboard. This was a long time coming but an impressive start. www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-po...

Just got around to reading www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... So many interesting hypotheses about how viruses have evolved revealed through structure. Great work @grovearmada.bsky.social @spyroslytras.bsky.social and others.

Hello influenza enthusiasts! You may be interested in our recent publication linked below. We used multi-strain serology to figure out who got infected with which A/H3N2 influenza strain and when, allowing us to reconstruct epidemiological patterns back to 1968 stratified by time, age and location.

Really proud to share our preprint describing early adaptation of H5N1 to US dairy cattle, and showing how these mutations enhance the ability of the virus to infect other mammals, such as pigs and humans. With @influenzal.bsky.social @vidhid.bsky.social @drclairesmith.bsky.social and many more!