Erin Harvey

@erinharvey.bsky.social

Alexander von Humboldt fellow at @ FLI 🇩🇪 | virus emergence and evolution | pathogen discovery | metagenomics and bioinformatics | 🇦🇺 living abroad

Truly bizarre story of how two papers from the 1940s by physics pioneer Max Planck have been "retracted" from Naturwissenschaften, potentially by an algorithm, for anachronistic "plagiarism" issues, leaving the current editor baffled (but it is Springer Nature so.... www.science.org/content/arti...

Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame

science.org

Teams in the Democratic Republic of the Congo & Uganda have now shared the first sequences from the current Ebola (Bundibugyo virus) outbreak using Pathoplexus, just days after cases were confirmed. Read more about the response to Bundibugyo virus here: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-05...

Pathoplexus | Ebola: Rapid response to the Bundibugyo virus outbreak in the DRC and Uganda

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

The advanced metagenomics for virus discovery workshop is underway in South Africa. Participants from 20 countries, global South such as Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Ghana, collaborating with expert teams from CERI, Karolinska Institutet, Germany, Australia, Japan

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Today, we start one of the most advanced virus discovery & metagenomics workshop in the world in Stellenbosch. Experts from Australia, America, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Italy, Nederlands, Japan, U.K and Sweden come together to teach participants from 20 countries.

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📣Calling Australian/NZ ECRs and PhD Students 📣 Abstract submission and registration for MicroSeq2025 opens July 21! Abstracts for both medium-length and lightning talks will be welcome.

MicroSeq2025 is an ECR and PhD student-friendly online meeting focused on the interface between sequencing technology and microbiology. being held on 3rd and 4th September, 2025. Registration and abstract submission opens on July 21, 2025 and abstracts are due August 8, 2025. Participants can register at microseqconference.com.

After just short of nine years in the Holmes group, it’s come time for me to move on and stop spending Eddie’s money. I’ve had an incredible time working with everything from Antarctic ticks to Brazilian bird poo. But I’m excited to be starting a Humboldt fellowship and joining FLI in Germany

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We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

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The first measles death in the US in a decade -- the tragic, preventable death of a child whose parents chose not to protect them with vaccination -- should spark an immediate nation-wide campaign to ensure all children are protected against preventable diseases. Anything less is unconscionable.