🌟Join us for the 2nd ISME #UnityInDiversity Conference!🌟 📅Oct 21 |🕗8 AM PST · 5 PM CET · 11 PM Beijing 🎤 Speakers: @sewerynoz.bsky.social · Ho · @nanditagarud.bsky.social · Medina-Chavez · Moroenyane · Wan 🔗Register: isme-microbes.org/invitation-t... Celebrate diversity in microbial ecology!✨

With all of the layoffs and teaching/research funding chaos in the US at the moment, it makes me wonder about perhaps less apparent ripple effects; eg: how will the journal peer review process be impacted given its heavy reliance on free reviewer labour and the sheer number of researchers in the US

Very happy to see viruses, plasmids and mini-euks included in a characterised metagen DB - much more of a “meta” view of microbial ecology! Oh and a nice example of the benefit of using long reads in the metagen space.

Very excited to present the Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database (GBR-MGD), a comprehensive DB of 1000s of high-quality prokaryote, virus, plasmid, and chromosome-level eukaryote MAGs using Nanopore long reads. Subthreads incoming. Please share widely. 🙂 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I think that a major driver of adherents to the COVID19 lab leak theory is that they cannot handle the simple truth that we are not in control of pandemics. The idea that novel pathogens emerge naturally is too frightening for them to handle. Yet that is how pandemics have begun throughout history.

Speaking of small plasmids, shout out to Plassembler by @gbouras13.bsky.social! It's the only tool I know of that can reliably assemble small plasmids from long-read data, and I use it with Autocycler to improve small plasmid recovery. github.com/gbouras13/pl... (5/6)

the tool of the elite bioinformatician