Damien Joly, the chief executive officer of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, is warning a lack of funding for wildlife disease monitoring is undermining Canada’s ability to detect and respond to emerging threats to biodiversity, agriculture and human health. thenarwhal.ca/wildlife-dis...

Underfunding threatens Canada’s wildlife disease response | The Narwhal

As bird flu and chronic wasting disease spread, experts say Canada’s wildlife disease monitoring network needs more resources to respond

thenarwhal.ca

Come join my group as a postdoc on a fun wildepi.ca project looking at the evolution of endemic alpha- and betacoronaviruses in Canadian wildlife. Computational work will inform concurrent experimental work in the @banerjeelab.ca and @smubareka.bsky.social groups! bioinformatics.ca/jobs/postdoc...

On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5

The associated slogan of "where infinite ambition meets global impact" being mostly evocative of futility ("where an unstoppable force meets an immovable object") also contributes to this feeling.

Probably should have seen this coming when they expensively redesigned the logo to detach the head from the rest of the body.

Six days. Six days with no news for students or locked out faculty, counsellors, and librarians. Six days with no news for other staff, community partners, or research collaborators at other univs. Six days of the senior admin doing nothing. 15 days since the admin was at the bargaining table.

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

Here’s where we stand: My union moved on salary and was willing to talk: Dal mgmnt was not interested My union offered to find ways to save money: Mgmnt said no. My union wanted to work together to build new child care: Mgmnt didn’t care. Let’s #KeepDalStrong, we said. No, they replied.

🦘✂️ Thanks to @cziscience.bsky.social , @wytamma.bsky.social and I are writing the next version of the Snippy bacterial variant calling pipeline. We want your input on what features s it will have. Please fill out this (longish) survey to help make Snippy great again! forms.gle/YJP6WQjsk8KK...

Snippy: Microbial Variant Calling Community Survey

Help us drive the next wave of innovation in Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) discovery and genome analysis by sharing your valuable experiences and insights. This in-depth survey aims at understa...

forms.gle

📢 We're excited to introduce Pathoplexus, a specialized sequence database for human viral pathogens! 🌍 🧬 Launching with 4 viruses, Pathoplexus.org combines modern open-source software with transparent governance to improve global pathogen sequence sharing. 1/14

Pathoplexus| Home

Pathoplexus is a new, open-source database dedicated to the efficient sharing of human viral pathogen genomic data, fostering global collaboration and public health response.

pathoplexus.org

Day 2 of #pha4gecon: Sarah Hersey (Head of WHO IPSN) chairing resource limited infra for pathobioinf. First Joel Sevinsky, building on www.nature.com/articles/s41... Terra+theaigen wfs FISMA/FedRAMP compliant example. Cloud costs 1-2% of consumables. New Theaigen Global Health Initiative non-profit

Ten recommendations for supporting open pathogen genomic analysis in public health - Nature Medicine

To support progress in genomic epidemiology, a transparent, user-friendly approach is required.

nature.com

Alan Christoffels kicks off the first PHA4GE conference in beautiful Stellenbosch, with a wonderful opening keynote from Anita Ghansah #PHA4GEcon

A great sets of talks on QA to kick off #pha4gecon sessions: Josephina Campos (IPSN), Karen Osman (UKHSA), Constantina Laou (UKHSA@AfricaCDC), and Sarah Mwangi (AfricaCDC) about the challenges of external quality assurance programs for pathogen genomics at a national, regional, and global level.

"Past, Present, and Future of Software for Bayesian Inference" - An interesting overview of what, exactly, building software to do Bayesian inference means If you use Stan, JAGS, PyMC, NumPyro, etc, you might be interested. www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/rese...

For @mblscience.bsky.social & other science recent arrivals, here is a much more comprehensive intro to Bsky doc by @markrubin.bsky.social that might be helpful: docs.google.com/document/d/1... And a running list of Science-Related Feeds on Bsky as they get created docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

BlueSky for Scientists

BlueSky for Scientists Authors: Steve Haroz and Mark Rubin URL: http://blueskyscience.steveharoz.com Features you may miss from Twitter or Mastodon As BlueSky is in beta, some features are not implem...

docs.google.com

Final #GMI13 day, Academic-Government Teams starts with Ben Howden (MDU) on the Australian Pathogen Genomics Program: need AusTrakka (used differently for research & PH surveillance), accreditation, multidisciplinarity, formal implementation/eval. Wins not always papers & change not always popular!

Day 2 #GMI13 starts with Indigenous Data Governance Principles and Data Sharing Experiences. Taylor Morriseau (FNHS MB) explains centrality of OCAP principles (fnigc.ca/ocap-training/), specific FN benefits+principles (not pan-indigenous), free+prior informed consent. Emphasises Inclusion != Equity

Conference organiser Emma Griffiths kicking us off with a great introduction to the purpose of #GMI13 and the (still) open and growing challenges in global microbial genomics data sharing and harmonisation.

Woke up from a dream this morning: I was taking a statistics exam on a moving bus and it was proctored by a colleague dancing while wearing VR goggles. First day of the academic year is going well.