Riboseek is a fast RNA/DNA search. More sensitive than nhmmer at 250x speed. Structure-aware realignment produces MSAs approaching rMSA quality. Plus 1.7M precomputed RNA MSAs, and an API to search your own 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💾 github.com/steineggerla... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/riboseek

The manuscript describing SimPhyNI is now published! www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... A few updates since last post, including some method tweaks that improve performance and speed. Also even easier to run. Try it for your microbial GWAS or epistasis needs!

High-precision binary trait association on phylogenetic trees

Traditional methods for identifying associations between genomic features and traits, or between pairs of genomic traits, struggle when applied to bacterial genomes. While several microbial genome-wid...

microbiologyresearch.org

Tami Lieberman@contaminatedsci.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Proud to announce SimPhyNI, a new tool for bacterial GWAS with higher precision and scalability than existing tools. Try it out and let us know what you think!!

New blog post! I reran the Autocycler paper benchmarks on some new tools/versions/pipelines: rrwick.github.io/2026/07/24/b... (1/3)

It's out! 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.nature.com/articles/s41...

The planktonic microbiome of the Great Barrier Reef - Nature

The Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database compiles prokaryotic, viral and eukaryotic genomes from seawater collected from the Great Barrier Reef, providing a rich resource for the study of mar...

nature.com

Significant update to the AllTheBacteria paper, including discovering new antimicrobial peptides and testing in vitro and vivo. This has grown into a fantastic collaboration!

César de la Fuente@delafuentelab.bsky.social · 2w ago

Biology has plenty of data—the challenge is making it usable. AllTheBacteria transforms 2.44 million public bacterial and archaeal genomes into an open, uniformly processed, searchable, AI-ready resource. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/ Excited to share the newest tool in the pangenome MUMiverse: Shredtools! Shredtools enables a user to navigate the pangenome coordinate system with multi-MUMs. More in the thread🧵 Code: github.com/vikshiv/shredtools Interactive tool for querying HPRC assemblies: vikshiv.github.io/shredtools

Navigating the pangenome coordinate system with Shredtools

Existing notions of pangenome coordinates rely on hard-to-compute multiple sequence alignments. On the other hand, pangenome-wide exact unique matches (multi-MUMs) can be computed efficiently, and rep...

biorxiv.org

minibwa-0.4 released with minor improvement and a few fixes to typos. Also a new blog post on "minibwa is the new bwa-mem": lh3.github.io/2026/07/04/m...

JOB ALERT! I'm hiring two postdocs in Computational Genomics to join our lab in beautiful Gothenburg, Sweden. Please share and repost! CGRLab.github.io/research/

Senior Bioinformatics Software Developer opening in my team in ONT's Applications department! Hybrid with a few days a week in our Oxford headquarters. We can sponsor visas! www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/44...

New study by Alexander Henoch (@ahenoch.bsky.social), a PhD student in our group @hifmb.de and @awi.de, shows what it takes to bring gene synteny into microbial pangenomes, and what we learn about the variability landscape of genomes when we do that. See the pre-print here: doi.org/10.64898/202...

How good is MiniBWA, the successor to BWA? To test it, I ran MiniBWA on sequencing from 76 different species, comparing mapping speed, rate and accuracy with BWA MEM. In short, it's really good. If you map short reads, it's well worth your time. andrewcarroll.github.io/2026/06/30/t...

I'm happy to announce the release of GlobDB r232! This version contains 346,233 bacterial and archaeal genomes, based on 26 datasets. More info globdb.org 🦠🖥️🧬

We're excited to share our work on how prophages influence the evolution of resistance against DNA-damaging antibiotics! This has been a fun project with @sianowen.bsky.social, @baym.lol, @theshreyaspai.bsky.social, @kepatitis-c.bsky.social, & @fernpizza.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

SOS-mediated prophage induction constrains resistance evolution to DNA-damaging antibiotics

Most naturally occurring bacteria are lysogens, encoding one or more temperate phages (prophages) integrated into their genome. As prophages are induced by the bacterial SOS response, DNA-damaging ant...

biorxiv.org

Congratulations to my PhD student, Stefania Andrea Rosso Villanelo, on publishing her first first-author paper! 🎉In this study, she used antibiotics to facilitate the isolation of previously uncultured bacterial species from activated sludge. Check it out! 🦠🧫💊 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Application of antibiotics for the selective isolation of previously uncultured species from activated sludge | Microbiology Spectrum

Biological wastewater treatment relies on diverse microbial communities to degrade pollutants and drive nutrient transformations. Understanding the physiology and metabolism of these microorganisms is essential for improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of treatment processes. Much of our current knowledge is derived from 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and metagenomic analyses. However, validating these sequencing- and genome-based insights requires bacterial species as pure cultures, and only a limited number of taxa common in wastewater treatment plants are currently available in culture. Here, we present an isolation strategy that uses antibiotics as a selective pressure to reduce microbial complexity and alleviate competitive exclusion during cultivation, while full-length 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing is used to monitor enrichment and guide targeted isolation, thereby facilitating the recovery of process-relevant activated sludge bacteria, including potentially uncultured taxa. These isolates can serve as model organisms for experimental validation of genome-based predictions.

journals.asm.org

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

🧬 New preprint! We clustered 5.6 million bacterial genomes into genomically cohesive units (GCUs) 500× faster than existing tools. (In just 14 hours, 16.5 GB RAM using 48 CPUs). 🦠🐙Meet gemsparcl 💎✨! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#rustbio 4.0 has been released. It harmonizes the error handling, improves the API, makes gap-open/extend behavior in pairwise alignment more intuitive and in-line with the literature, improves GFF parsing, and allows incremental building of the rank-select datastructure. github.com/rust-bio/rus...

Release v4.0.0 · rust-bio/rust-bio

4.0.0 (2026-06-12) ⚠ BREAKING CHANGES Replace anyhow with typed thiserror errors (#674) Change Phase conversion methods to use TryFrom for better error handling (#625) for pairwise alignment, only...

github.com

New blog post! I analyse the new hac@v6.0.0 basecalling model from @nanoporetech.com and discuss the conspicuous lack of a new sup model: rrwick.github.io/2026/06/11/d...

Excited to have Alex Crits Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social join the lab today as a staff scientist! I had a hunch it was good time to find an experienced computational microbiologist to join the lab, but still feel very lucky to have him joining us. Looking forward to cool science!

Is @nanoporetech.com hac v6 better than 5.2.0 sup? The short answer is no. But are a few errors in a genome worth 5 times more basecalling compute? github.com/Kirk3gaard/M...

Folddisco is now published @natbiotech.nature.com. It’s a fast motif search for similar 3D DISCOntinuous residues like catalytic sites or zinc fingers across the entire protein universe. 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💾 folddisco.foldseek.com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 🌐 https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco - Nature Biotechnology

Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

nature.com

Martin Steinegger 🇺🇦@martinsteinegger.bsky.social · last yr.

Folddisco finds similar (dis)continuous 3D motifs in large protein structure databases. Its efficient index enables fast uncharacterized active site annotation, protein conformational state analysis and PPI interface comparison. 1/9🧶🧬 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/folddisco

Excited to share our review relating to the giant extrachromosomal elements (ECEs) We cover: why long-read metagenomics enables their discovery, genomic comparisons across recently characterized examples, and limitations of current classification tools. www.cell.com/trends/genet...

Giants within: a new class of microbial mobile elements

Prokaryotes harbor a diverse spectrum of extrachromosomal elements (ECEs), which are intracellular replicons maintained independently of the primary chromosome. Historically, the ECE research field ha...

cell.com

Our method, savont, for generating amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) for long-read amplicons is now on bioRxiv. Work with @lh3lh3.bsky.social and help from @mkddueholm.bsky.social and team (Marie Riisgaard-Jensen, @kirk3gaard.bsky.social, Kasper Skytte Andersen) github.com/bluenote-157... 1/6

bioRxiv Bioinfo@biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Sensitive long-read amplicon sequence variant recovery with savont https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.26.727271v1

Jeremy Wang developed rammap, a minimap2 rewrite in Rust. It achieves comparable or better performance than minimap2 and produces identical output to minimap2. During rewrite, Jeremy found two long-existing bugs in minimap2 which are fixed in v2.31. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Sensitive long-read amplicon sequence variant recovery with savont https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.26.727271v1

Come to ONT's industry event at ASM to hear about two exciting new tools from @jimshaw.bsky.social! SNPmers (polymorphic kmers) are leveraged for impressive performance in both myloasm (metagenomic assembly) and savont (16S ASVs). Registration link 👇

Oxford Nanopore@nanoporetech.com · 2mo ago

Join Jim Shaw at #ASMicrobe to uncover how to unlock high-resolution, strain-level microbiome insights. Learn how this is could be crucial to helping deliver more precise diagnostics and treatment in the future. https://bit.ly/4v4XuKE

Excited to speak at ASM Microbe 2026 in the Oxford Nanopore session about new tools for long-read metagenomics + 16S sequencing. If you're attending ASM Microbe June 4-7 in D.C. and want to chat, let me know!

Oxford Nanopore@nanoporetech.com · 2mo ago

Join Jim Shaw at #ASMicrobe to uncover how to unlock high-resolution, strain-level microbiome insights. Learn how this is could be crucial to helping deliver more precise diagnostics and treatment in the future. https://bit.ly/4v4XuKE

TaxProfiler, the @nf-co.re #metagenomics pipeline had a new major release, adding multiple cool new classifiers (metacache, sylph and melon)! Great work by Sofia, @lilianderssonli.bsky.social , @jfy133.genomic.social.ap.brid.gy and others! 🙌 github.com/nf-core/taxp...

Release v2.0.0 - Crazy Corgi · nf-core/taxprofiler

Added #682 Added metacache classifier and improved nf-tests (added by @sofstam) #559 Profiling of long reads with motus (added by @LilyAnderssonLee and @sofstam ) #591 Add options to enable the ab...

github.com

nf-core@nf-co.re · 4mo ago

Pipeline release! nf-core/taxprofiler v2.0.0 - v2.0.0 - Crazy Corgi! Please see the changelog: https://github.com/nf-core/taxprofiler/releases/tag/2.0.0

New versions of skDER (github.com/raufs/skDER) and zol (github.com/Kalan-Lab/zol) are now on Bioconda. Both have automated downloading of genomes based on species / genus name according to classifications in GTDB R232. The latest zol also incorporates FAMSA2 which provides considerable speed boosts!

Mushuvirus is the most widespread phage genus in the human gut. 🌍 Together with other family members, these viruses occur in 89% of humans worldwide, including the Iceman Ötzi! How is it possible that they were hidden in previous metagenomic analyses? [1/7] Read: doi.org/10.64898/202...