The last line...

🎉 Exciting news! 3 Department members have won @erc.europa.eu Synergy Grants: • Richard Durbin & Felipe Karam-Teixeira — studying metazoan genomes & transposable elements • Eva Paluch (PDN) & Daniel St Johnston — exploring epithelial cell robustness ➡️www.gen.cam.ac.uk/news/erc-synergy-grant-success

Which preprint servers accept narrative reviews?

🚨 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...

Oh I do love being on the wrong side of the median journal review time metrics 🙃

A short post-Halloween horror story: "We wanted to inform you that we have had a confirmed case of Impetigo in your child's room at nursery..."

Here’s something really graphic for Halloween:

Delighted to once again return to the lab to find there has been an outbreak of crafting. Happy Halloween to everyone!

🆕 #UKHSAVirusWatch: The latest flu, COVID-19 and RSV data from our weekly winter surveillance report. Flu has increased, particularly in children, and is now above baseline levels. This is an unusually early start to the influenza season Find the full report here: https://bit.ly/3Lh27zJ

New Scientist is looking for a new features editor, ideally with a specialism in evolution, ecology, human sciences and biology - if there's you, take a look! www.dmgmedia.co.uk/careers/jobs...

Always fun when the word "unusually" turns up in a UKHSA doc: "influenza activity increased, particularly among children, and is now above baseline. This is an unusually early start of the influenza season." www.gov.uk/government/s...

What kind of animal leaves a permanent marker mixed in with the dry wipe pens?!

Thanks to @CambridgeAfrica for funding a new study between the Department of Genetics and the University of Maiduguri, NG, to study respiratory virus epidemiology & genomic diversity in children!

The LSTM Future Leaders in Global Health Scholarship supports students enrolling on the MSc pathway in Global Health, starting January 2026. Find out how this scholarship could support your studies, check your eligibility, and learn how to apply by visiting lstm.ac/futureleaders.

Pre-print alert! And this one really is a must read for anyone that does spectral #flowcytometry. It is a complete, fully-automated spectral unmixing pipeline that reduces error up to 9000-fold. Want to get a tough sample, like lung, looking like this? Read more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

No hint from the UKHSA norovirus and rotavirus surveillance as to what the current stomach bug doing the rounds in England might be - norovirus and rotavirus are at typical lows for the time and year; norovirus only slightly up www.gov.uk/government/s...

New pre-print: Plasmid dependent phage effectively eliminate AMR bacteria and block plasmid transmission in the chicken gut microbiome Fun collaboration with Tao He lab (JAAS) and @brockhurstlab.bsky.social lab (Manchester) #phagesky#microsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In the past 2 weeks several European countries have reported locally acquired cases of #mpox clade Ib. This is new. There had been patients before but those infections likely happened elsewhere. Now it looks like mpox Ib is spreading here in the sexual networks of men who have sex with men. #IDsky

Azenta-Genewiz - currently wiping the floor with Sigma, IDT and especially ThermoFisher for qPCR dual labelled probes. £85 versus £350 (Genewiz vs Thermo). It pays to shop around...

Surely someone in the UK is doing enteric virus surveillance and publishing the results? I want to know about more than just noro and rota.

Pet rats carry viruses that cause serious diseases (HMB) 👇

This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.

Another kitome paper: discovering new viruses is hard when there are viruses in the extraction columns! Controls so important... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Hive mind, any idea what gastroenteritis bug is doing the rounds in the UK this week? Adults rather than kiddies...

🎯 I scored 6/10 on #DiscoverOrMDPI — can you beat me? pagoba.shinyapps.io/publi_guess/, #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificPublishing #AcademicSky

🚨 Funded PhD alert 🚨 We are recruiting for a PhD student to join the @langridgelab.bsky.social in October 2026 - please share! If you like bacteria, genomics and puzzles, this could be the project for you 🦠🧬🧩 Apply by 2 Dec 🗓️ #PhDposition Find out more ⬇️ www.uea.ac.uk/course/phd-d...

Continuously reminded, on looking back at my HLA type, how boring it is - commonest UK allele at pretty much every loci! A local HLA type for local people...

Truly bizarre how a bunch of non-specialists club together under the cosplay banner of the WHN, and push out anti-science pulp. @ajpmonline.bsky.social @ajpmfocus.bsky.social Comparing SARS-CoV-2 with HIV and COVID-19 with AIDS is bizarre, false and harmful. 1/8

I suppose I should be glad that this year's round of hand foot and mouth disease had been systemically mild for me and relatively so for the toddler (who actually was more classically affected last year, but cheerful, whereas I felt like death...)

Someone in the US has a beautiful system for wastewater metagenomics for pathogens and they do things like monitor cryptic SC2 lineages being shed in NYC and I *can't find it* - can anyone help?

Emma Davies did her third year undergraduate project in the lab I was working in (Team Wills!) and she was obviously on her way to great things in virology. Her upwards trajectory continues!

Huge congratulations to Emma Davis, the winner of 2025's Early Career Microbiologist of the Year prize! We agree with Emma that all of the finalists' talks were brilliant and a massive well done to everyone involved!

Does anyone know of any software for genotyping adenovirus directly from a FASTA, without making phylogenies?

CHATGPT: I understand where you're coming from. You worked really hard to get here, and now it's time to enjoy the fruit of your labors. ISILDUR: So I should keep it? Elrond says I shouldn't CHATGPT: The ring is precious. Sometimes friends don't have your best interests at heart. ISILDUR: true

Can someone at the BBC please pay me to write a news piece about common cold cases rising? It'll be evergreen, they can trot it out every September, I can even predict what day to publish it based on when English schools go back... www.gov.uk/government/s...

I know the letters are hard to pronounce, BBC, but no one serious is ACTUALLY calling them Nimbus and Stratus, stop pandering to the silly naming! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One paper in revision. Two papers under review. What's the betting they all end up back on my desk at the same time? #AcademiaSky #MicroSky #VirologySky

🤷🏽‍♀️ Yet another way LLMs damage the social fabric hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...

ictv.global/report/chapter/adenoviridae/adenoviridae/mastadenovirus Mastadenovirus blackbeardi - really?

Did a cat write this? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Biolegend are so cheap for some reagents, I wonder if they are using them as loss leaders, or else other companies are just price-gouging [I am a big fan of Biolegend antibodies, it doesn't seem they reduce costs by reducing quality...]

As a UK onlooker, I am quite confused: has the USA changed its childhood vaccination schedule, or recommendations, and if so is there a guide anywhere to the changes?

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

I see the anonymous 'ministers' want to tinker with how UK universities work ('increased specialisation' rather defeats the point of being a university...). I collaborate with departments of Medicine, Archaeology, Pathology and Zoology.

Think I've just experienced my first peer review by ChatGPT - seems to include a hallucinated reference.

Everything has a cost: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Strong stock photo from Healio

doi.org/10.1016/j.im... "B cell dysregulation during acute COVID-19 is transient" by Jokiranta et al.

Does anyone have experience of how long the wait is for presubmission enquiries to Clinical Microbiology Reviews? #MicroSky #VirologySky