What makes human guts and coral reefs similar? Here is a blog post with some thoughts on ecosystem stability, stress, and microbiome, following a fresh pre-print by Marko Terzin et al: merenlab.org/blog/coral-r...

From coral reefs to human guts: stress is stress

Reefs and colons share no taxa, no host, no timescale, but they report stress the same way, which tells us where NOT to look for solutions.

merenlab.org

We’re hiring!! Interesting in fieldwork and working with cute mice? See below for further information

📣 📣 📣 We’re looking for two field techs to support wild rodent fieldwork in the UK and join a collaborative team across RVC, Oxford, and Glasgow. NB: Candidates must already have the right to work in the UK. Full details: bit.ly/4pKY2nF Please share widely! 🐭 Video credit: Elise Ringwaldt

📣 📣 📣 We’re looking for two field techs to support wild rodent fieldwork in the UK and join a collaborative team across RVC, Oxford, and Glasgow. NB: Candidates must already have the right to work in the UK. Full details: bit.ly/4pKY2nF Please share widely! 🐭 Video credit: Elise Ringwaldt

We are now recruiting for a 3 year NERC-funded postdoc to study the transmission dynamics of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in migratory birds. Based in the Wild Microbiome Lab @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful Cornwall.

📢 Registration is now open for the first UK Virome Forum meeting! This two-day event will bring together UK-based researchers using genomic approaches to study viromes. Whether you are investigating viral communities in soil 🌱, the human gut 🦠, or whales 🐋, this is your space!

Attention ECRs! The next round of our ECR Research Exchanges is open for application! Up to €1400 for travel & accommodation for visits to groups with complementary research interests. You can find the application here: bit.ly/4ntSVY4 and more info on our website: www.wamestn.com/research-exc...

2026_WAME_ECR_Exchange.docx

Wild Animal Microbiome Evolution – WAME A Special Topic Network funded by ESEB ECR Research exchange visits Funding available to help early career scientists visit another research group with compleme...

docs.google.com

Working on any aspects of host viromes or viral communities and UK based? Join the newly established UK Virome Forum @ukvf.bsky.social to connect with other researchers and get updates on an upcoming event in October!

UKVF.bsky.social@ukvf.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Big news for the virome research community!  We are thrilled to announce the first-ever UK Virome Forum (UKVF) in-person event! Whether you're a PhD student, an ECR, or a PI working in virome-related research, this is your space to connect and collaborate.

Please share! My lab has an open fully-funded PhD position at Vilnius University's Life Sciences Center in Lithuania. The PhD project will involve identifying missing orthomyxovirus segments from public sequence data. Applicants must hold an MSc by June & have bioinformatics experience. 1/2

My super department @warwicklifesci.bsky.social is hiring 6 assistant profs in the wake of recent retirements. We're looking for people in microbiology/infection, cellular disease / immunity; environmental biology; and plant/crop science. #MicroSky warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G...

Insightful summary of an extraordinary person being extraordinarily fired: "you don't silence a woman of color who raised concerns about racism by silencing her...The fingerprints are distributed perfectly across the system." www.linkedin.com/pulse/uclas-...

UCLA's Most Decorated Ecologist Just Got Fired : Here's the sequence

In January of 2025, at the ICTP ICTS winter school at NCBS, Priyanga Amarasekare offered to take me and a few other students out for my birthday. She didn't have to do that.

linkedin.com

A nice collaboration from post-docs in my lab 😊 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @jingdi.bsky.social @luismsilva.bsky.social @paradyseb.bsky.social @molecularecolup.bsky.social

Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals

Parasites are a ubiquitous force in nature threatening wildlife populations and ecosystems. Interactions between hosts and their parasites are impacted by host-associated microbiomes, which are essen...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Excited to share my first paper! Co-circulating viruses in bats show diverse spatial movement patterns, perhaps due to different infection biology. Not all viruses move like their hosts, or like other viruses; Use them for inference with awareness and care!🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Virus‐Dependent Geographic Structure of Co‐Circulating Viruses in a Single Bat Species

Understanding the spatial spread of viruses within wildlife populations is often a key component of disease management efforts. Viral spread is likely constrained by host ecology, but inter-virus dif...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Wondering what happens if a seal sneezes on a whale? We were! 🦭🤧🐋 We sequenced viromes from 16 species of marine mammals stranded in Scotland. Of >100 viruses detected, ~10% appeared in multiple species (one in both seals & cetaceans!), mirroring known interspecies interactions in Scottish waters.

ARTIC are hiring! Postdoctoral opportunity in metagenomics at the University of Birmingham edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Research Fellow (Postdoctoral) - School of Biosciences - 107071 - Grade 7

This post-doctoral position will contribute to both complementary programmes, developing ‘broadband’ metagenomic sequencing capabilities for rapid detection and characterisation of emerging and unknow...

edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com

PhD position (Hatfield/London, UK) Impact of heterogeneity in contact rates and lifespan on virus transmission and persistence in natural populations with @jraghwani.bsky.social Matthew Hall; @krisparag.bsky.social at Royal Veterinary... More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2482

Can safely way this is the craziest and coolest study I have led. We chart the evolution of sheeppox virus, finding it in the Eurasian steppe ~3700 years ago, and also in a LOT of parchment from medieval Europe (made from a range of animals skins!) #aDNA

bioRxiv Genetics@biorxiv-genetic.bsky.social · 5mo ago

3,500 years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.23.707469v1

We have an open Assistant Professor position (tenure track) @ethz.ch in Computational Immunology - ethz.ch/en/the-eth-z... Please apply / share!

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Computational Immunology

ethz.ch

📢 Funded PhD opportunity (UK Home fees + stipend) With me (RVC), Matthew Hall (LSHTM), and @krisparag.bsky.social (Imperial College) Interested in bringing together field data and theory to understand how viruses persist in wildlife populations? Full details here: bit.ly/4bVTBl4

Investigating the impact of heterogeneity in contact rates and lifespan on virus transmission and persistence in natural populations at Royal Veterinary College on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Investigating the impact of heterogeneity in contact rates and lifespan on virus transmission and persistence in natural populations at Royal Veterinary College, listed on FindAPhD.com

bit.ly

Excited about parasites? Love watching movies? Come join our Wellcome-funded project! Parasitology friends, please do share far and wide.

@knuepferlab.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The HartLab is looking for a research assistant to support the exploration of red blood cell invasion by Plasmodium and Babesia parasites and the establishment of their distinct intracellular niches. For more information on this 4-year position follow the link below: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQH098/r...

New resource #VirJenDB delivers a #FAIR, community driven database of virus sequences and metadata across the entire virosphere, unifying phage and eukaryotic virus research infrastructures 📄 https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1224 👤EVBC: R. Edwards, M. Marz, S. Saghaei, S. Roux, B. Dutilh, N. Cassmann

🚨 Postdoctoral Opportunity for Female Scientists🚨 The University of Vienna is awarding at least 20 fully funded 4 year postdoctoral positions to outstanding female scientists Interested? Get in touch via direct message careers.univie.ac.at/en/postdoc/e... #MicroSky 🧪 #PostDoc @univie.ac.at

The final piece of my PhD work is now published in Science Translational Medicine! We present a new framework to jointly infer epidemiological and antigenic parameters from multi-pathogen population serological studies🦠 www.science.org/stoken/autho...

Article about scientists leaving (or not leaving) the US - including me! I landed in a truly great spot - but what's happening in the US is messed up. @isemevol.bsky.social @sfstatebio.bsky.social @umontpellier.bsky.social

Jason Mast@jasonmast.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Amid talk of a brain drain, some scientists leave U.S. behind www.statnews.com/2025/12/17/r...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature

Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

nature.com

🦇 Two PhD positions available on our new ARC Discovery Grant: "From Diversity to Disease: Viral Ecology, Evolution and Persistence in Bats" The project will investigate how viral diversity evolves and persists, with a particular focus on recently discovered henipaviruses in Australian flying foxes.

Soil viruses are important regulators of ecosystem function, but what are their roles in environments that face long-term degradation and restoration? In our paper published today in Nature Micro, we asked how soil viruses influence peatland recovery, and vice versa. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ecosystem health shapes viral ecology in peatland soils - Nature Microbiology

Metagenomics shows that viral diversity and community structure are shaped by geography and ecosystem health status, positioning viruses as unexpected players in peatland restoration.

nature.com

Just a few days to go until the next London Infection & Ecology Network @lien-london.bsky.social event at the Natural History Museum! A great chance to connect with researchers across ecology and infectious disease. Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-inf...

London Infection and Ecology Meeting, 12th December, Natural History Musuem

Join us in person at the Natural History Museum on Dec 12 for the London Infection and Ecology Meeting!

eventbrite.co.uk

🚨New Paper!🚨 Some like it hot: Matt Turnbull and @samjwilsonphd.bsky.social collaborated with groups from @cvrinfo.bsky.social, @cam.ac.uk and beyond to show that, while our fevers are hot enough to control human flu, they don't protect against avian influenzas adaptd to the hotter bodies of birds

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals

Host body temperature can define a virus’s replicative profile—influenza A viruses (IAVs) adapted to 40° to 42°C in birds are less temperature sensitive in vitro compared with human isolates adapted t...

science.org

My 1st first-author paper is out as a preprint! Excited to share the fascinating story of marine-feeding vampire bats 🌊🦇 We found that marine-diet bats were exposed to #H5#AvianFlu 🦠 from marine wildlife and could potentially spread it to livestock via blood feed🩸 doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.09.686930

Excited to share that our paper on the relationship between viral load and metagenomic outputs in wildlife samples is now published in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety! 🎉 Fantastic collaboration with a brilliant team. More info: 📖 tinyurl.com/ywb7tvjm

Quantifying viral load and characterizing virus diversity in wildlife samples with target enrichment sequencing

Metagenomics is a powerful tool for characterizing viruses, with broad applications across diverse disciplines, from understanding the ecology and evolutionary history of viruses to identifying causat...

tinyurl.com