Apart from the AI junk part… the notion that one should not offer a potential mechanistic explanation for an observation, without first spending years & (unavailable) $$ trying to test possibilities before sharing the observation with others (who may be better equipped to investigate the mechanism)…

If you’re interested in metals, microbes and maths 🤘 - please check out this PhD on the impact of metals on microbial communities with @thecopperdoctor.bsky.social @blindmath.bsky.social Denis Patterson and myself, you’d be based in Durham & be part of a vibrant interdisciplinary research group

With sessions on global antimicrobial healthcare, drug/resistance mechanisms, bacterial vaccines & immunotherapy, and antimicrobial combinations & interactions. @conmeehan.bsky.social & I have enjoyed putting the schedule together, hope to see lots of you in Birmingham next month! #MicroSky

Hands down my favorite conference for meeting people in my field and hearing great science (and I don't just say thay cause I no co-chair). Come join us next month!

I'm trying to do some background reading on Hep C virus for a lecture. My first port of call tends to be 'Nature Disease Primers' to begin. So I find this one: www.nature.com/articles/nrd... Why write a primer, which I assume you want people far and wide to read, and then have it behind a paywall???

After a short website glitch, the applications are now open again - three #PhD opportunities; featuring (in no particular order) #Klebsiella, #protists, #biofilms, #microscopy, #bioinformatics, #mosquitoes, #midges and #microbiomes, see below! #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky #ProtistsOnSky #evobio 💻🧬🧪🦠🦟🔬

Reminder: no one is safe until everyone is safe. And Americans are now significantly less safe

Y'all. I just got ChatGPT to do everything in R for this manuscript. I mean EVERYTHING. And it's all legit and reproducible. I'm shook. How are we mentoring our trainees in statistics now? Who needs to learn coding in R line by line, and who doesn't? scienceforeveryone.science/statistics-i...

A reminder that the PhD program for EMBL is open for winter recruitment round. If you want to understand life at a molecular level and have a quantitative science (you don't have to have done biology - we love our mathematicians/physcists/chemists!) apply www.embl.org/about/info/e...

The deadline for abstracts for the BSAC Antibiotic Resistance and Mechanisms workshop in November is closing October 10th. Come join us for a packed 2-day programme in Birmingham! bsac.org.uk/antibiotic-r...

BBSRC Fellowships 2025 Triage Outcome Decisions were today. 277 applications, 42 put through to peer review and interview. A fellow I was supporting didn't get selected and BBSRC now offer *no feedback*. Months of work and not a single iota of feedback for the applicant. Honestly, disgraceful.

For those interested in taxonomy/nomenclature, a nice paper on the use of sub-genus rank to 'resolve' taxonomy/naming disputes (like we saw in Mycobacterium recently) www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Equitable data sharing is paramount, and this article outlines a framework for fairly attributing datasets to authors. Would be great to see this widely implicated! It was great being part of the consortium led by @lhug.bsky.social @alexjprobst.bsky.social and others. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols. Thread 1/n

Our paper on the pangenome of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex is now out in its final form (version of record) in eLife! elifesciences.org/articles/97870

I reread this over and over again and this absolutely breaks my brain

That's correct! Read the full details about #Microbio26 attendance rates here - microb.io/425T0Yc We will also be offering grants for the event. Applications for the Society Events Grant will open on 12 December 2025 and close on 2 January 2026 at 23:59 GMT.

The @microbiologysociety.org conference next year will have a 2 day attendance rate again! So happy with this, especially as this year I can only make 2-3 days.

I went to work on my lecture over some ramen and the server asked if I worked in healthcare, because she’s a cancer bioinformatician who can’t find a job and is in now in tenuous visa territory. I’m so sad and angry about this country, and it keeps hitting me at the moments I don’t expect it

Dr. Emilyn Costa Conceição, a remarkable Brazilian-African scientist, is making waves in the field of genomics with a purpose-driven approach. From the Amazon to Africa, she advocates for the importance of diverse voices in science. Read more about ceri.org.za/news/?token=...

VACANCY - We’re recruiting for a visionary group leader to lead fundamental research on Discovery Plant Science as part of our vibrant research community Successful candidate will be offered a six-year tenure-track position with the opportunity to apply for tenure: www.jic.ac.uk/vacancies/gr...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 My phage annotation tool, Phynteny, finally has a preprint and a brand new version powered by a cool AI transformer architecture and protein language models! #phagesky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Submitted a Welcome Trust Discovery grant yesterday. Probably biggest application I've ever done with a great team of collaborators. Proud of this at least, no matter what happens next. Is anyone needs me I'll be joining my cat Nebula in this pose.

Some guidance and overview of current data on Doxy-PEP for STI control journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Great presentation from Xenia at #esm2025 supported by @micronorman.bsky.social and @tlillebaek.bsky.social and others on decades of NTM isolates from patients and how it changes over those years.

A huge congratulations to @jodyphelan.bsky.social from @lshtm.bsky.social l for receiving the Gertrud Meissner Award at #ESM2025! 🏆 His work on bioinformatic pipelines to predict drug resistance is truly impactful. Well deserved! 🎉 #Tuberculosis #Awards #Science

I am Honoured to have received the 2nd Prize at NTU's ⭐️ STAR (Science & Tech Annual Research) Conference! Special thanks to my supervisors @conmeehan.bsky.social @blackpassiflora.bsky.social and collaborators @danwhiley.bsky.social @Kate Cox for the incredible support. @arom-ntu.bsky.social

Did leprosy exist in the Americas before European invasion? Our lab #aDNA study at @institutpasteur.bsky.social supervised by @nrascovan.bsky.social in collab with @avanzich.bsky.social (CSU) finds M.lepromatosis in pre-colonial Ancestors from North and South America www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited for the @esmyco.bsky.social 2025 conference programme! Come see me speak about M leprae SNP calling pipeline validationand @orentzfadia.bsky.social speak on some cool machine learning on the genus to find markers of pathogencitiy. www.esmycobacteriology.eu/event-progra...

You might be wondering why we haven't updated outbreak.info for months. Well, the reason is that GISAID cut our access in January - as they did others. Without telling us. After a ♾️ back and forth, that is now permanent. More on that soon - and why GISAID should not be trusted with critical data.

Great as always being at @itmantwerp.bsky.social today teaching whole genome sequencing for clinical tuberculosis management to the group of super engaged clinical doctors taking our DR-TB course. So many great questions I tried my best to answer 😅

SFU invites applications from world renowned researchers for the prestigious Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) 2026 Competition. Please see the ad to see if you qualify. In Vancouver, BC www.sfu.ca/vpacademic/a...

Myself and @yekwah.bsky.social are running our bacterial AMR databases and genotype prediction course again with @eventswcs.bsky.social. Completely free and study at your own pace. Check out the course objectives below and sign up before June 9th to join us! www.futurelearn.com/courses/anti...

Congratulations to @conmeehan.bsky.social and colleagues on the publication of their new manuscript. #microsky

Im looking for a good review paper on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and its intrinsic resistance to beta-lacatams for some training I am giving. Does anyone know of such an overview article?

We happily present: “Bakta Web – rapid and standardized genome annotation on scalable infrastructures” @OxUniPress NAR’s Web Server issue doi.org/10.1093/nar/... Easy to use, no registration, fast, scalable, various visualizations, in sync with Bakta CLI: bakta.computational.bio (1/5)

Applications for Outreach and Engagement grant are now open. Eligible members can apply for up to £1000 to support relevant science outreach or public engagement initiatives. Apply before the deadline 01 May 25 at 23:59 BST. Apply here: microb.io/OutreachandE...

Anyone know when BBSRC grant decisions are being released? By my calculations it should have been 2 weeks ago...

My first R package is officially out Bioconductor 3.21 today 🎉 TaxSEA adapts GSEA-style methods for metagenomic data— useful for interpreting differential abundance results. Manuscript accepted & in-press. Check it out bioconductor.org/packages/rel... #Bioinformatics #Metagenomics #RStats

🌟 Join Us for Optimising Metagenomics Assembled Genomes (MAGs) Building Workflows! 🌟 galaxyproject.org/events/2025-... MAGs building wfs are crucial for building new genomes & reducing microbial dark matter! Join our hackathon to collaboratively improve these workflows! #Metagenomics #Workflows

My final #ESCMIDGlobal session for Sunday is Tuberculosis: where are we now and where should we be.

New pre-print modelling impact of US funding cuts on HIV, #TB, MCH and family planning. We estimate impact of termination of US funding to NTPs via #USAID & The Global Fund may lead to 2.2 (1.5-2.9) million excess TB deaths between 2025 and 2040, reversing over a decade of progress. bit.ly/4lowp18

So glad this is finally out. The method has been instrumental in allowing us to compress the AllTheBacteria data - ~2 million bacterial genomes shrink from 3Terabytes (gzipped) to 100Gb using phylogenetic compression. Great work by @brinda.eu

Two ERC-funded postdoc positions available in the team - one here and second to follow - please repost! jobs.ncl.ac.uk/job/Newcastl...

1 week until deadline for this postdoc position. Really key position in my lab working on amazing datasets

Tuberculosis is not going away. If the cutting edge research goes away, #TB will rage on. Harvard is being targeted including the TB Immunology contract and that trickles down to all of us working on these studies. Progress will be halted. And TB will flourish. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/08/m...

Our antibiotics are under threat. 💊 Antimicrobial resistance is already causing them to be less effective at fighting some infections. We’re on a mission to save these precious medicines and Andi Biotic is leading the way. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTsO... #AMR #AntimicrobialResistance 🧪

TWO postdoc positions in Computational Microbiology and/or biochemistry. Join our interdisciplinary group in the new Life and Mind Building @OxfordBiology, @UniofOxford, @IneosOxford Please apply and share this post: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMP641/p...

So far there have been three measles deaths in under six weeks in the ongoing US measles outbreak. Prior to this year there had only been three measles deaths in the United States in total in the entire last thirty years.

We need the help of academics, health & policy professionals, and people with lived experience of tuberculosis (TB) to shape our next TB Action Plan. Together we can improve how we prevent, detect, and control TB. 🛡️ 🗓️ Deadline: 2 May 🔗 www.gov.uk/government/n...