Great write-up on the work my colleague Xinglin has been doing.

Keith Robison@omicsomics.bsky.social · 3d ago

When PCR Gives You Lemons... A Danish group has peered into PCR artifacts and turned them into a fascinating way to index genome libraries omicsomics.blogspot.com/2026/08/when...

I just realised that all my submitted grant proposals will notify about the outcome in October, and all of a sudden, I'm way less excited about the calendar getting there.

Happy birthday to @markowenmartin.bsky.social!

That email peddling your grant writing support services would hit harder if you didn’t send me basically the same email twice, about calls that are fully unrelated to my work, while claiming they were a “good fit”. It makes it look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Think big! Oh, and also keep it at 2 years and 250,000 EUR. I'm getting mixed messages here.

HMMER is an integral part of the software my whole career is built on. Software that researchers at the DOE have run millions of times. Complete, utter bollocks.

Zamin Iqbal@zaminiqbal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Oooh, @thomasfuchs.at, 2 conflicting PCRs being considered "mildly positive" wasn't on my bingo card.

Kristian G. Andersen@kgandersen.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Update on CDC's hantavirus response - it's worth the read because, well, it's a mess. A few things: 1️⃣ The US doesn't actually have a validated PCR test for Andes virus 2️⃣ "Mildly positive" was due to 2 conflicting tests. That's called "inconclusive" 3️⃣ Poor coordination www.cdc.gov/media/releas...

Paul Hoskisson discusses the Streptomyces genus; the soil microbes behind many of our most important antibiotics and a cornerstone of the antibiotic revolution. Excerpt from Matters Microbial 125: Antibiotics, Streptomyces and Evolution @markowenmartin.bsky.social @paulhoskisson.bsky.social

A new episode of my #MattersMicrobial podcast is available! This time, Dr. Paul Hoskisson joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss Streptomyces, antibiotics, and evolution. Please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord? I truly can use views and listens to keep podcasting. Thank you. youtu.be/2w9Hll4xcFk?...

Matters Microbial #125: Antibiotics, Streptomyces and Evolution

YouTube video by MicrobeTV

youtu.be

I'm not looking forward to a future where all the tools are being vibe-rewritten into languages people don't want to learn. Who will maintain all this? The original maintainers won't. It's not the language they were comfortable with. Does the prompter understand the tool well enough?

Phil Ewels@ewels.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Super excited to be launching two things today: #RustQC 🦀🧬 and rewrites.bio 🚀 I used AI to rewrite 15 RNA-seq QC tools into a single Rust binary (I've never written any Rust). It ended up being over 60x faster. Here's the story 🧵 seqeralabs.github.io/RustQC/

📢Come and join us in Mexico later this year for the 5th Series of #SBNP! Registration is now open - secure your spot today! 👉 Click here to head to the conference website for more information: bit.ly/4v25JYK

And people ask me why I don't enjoy web dev.

David Buchanan@retr0.id · 4mo ago

have you seen the new supply chain vuln? don't update tubu. it's literally on heebee. they got poodee's deps. they infiltrated dippy. roll back weeno. disable scripts in ~/.gumpyrc. it's in poob. do not install poob. do not update poob. uninstall poob right now. poob has it in for you.

The data use agreement to the new app we need to do our health and safety training in wants me to agree that they can use my picture to give me “access to the construction site”. So I guess I’m expected to read the data use notice, but nobody else read it before?

I’m getting the impression that this brand name is a lie.

Ah, nothing like light blue text on a dark blue background in a sunny meeting room.

Just listened to an interview with the OpenClaw dude, and this must have been the most dystopian thing I have heard in years. It had its funny parts when they were talking about security, I’ll grant you that. But overall, it was really bleak.

Thanks to @nicoleeavalon.bsky.social for leading the charge. Looking forward to another round of MIBiG annotathons

@nicoleeavalon.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The MIBiG 5.0 Annotathon is coming soon, and registration is now open! 🧬 Does your research involve biosynthetic gene clusters? Do you love natural product biosynthesis? Do you have an interest in rare & exotic enzymes? We can use your help & expertise. Register here 👉 forms.gle/C1cWcLHtrjT2...

I am truly grateful.

I am delighted and feel honored to be appointed as chair of Bioinformatics at @w-u-r.bsky.social . I look forward to working with the team and with our collaborators worldwide on keeping bioinformatics science and education flourishing at WUR and beyond. www.wur.nl/en/news/marn...

Marnix Medema appointed chair of Bioinformatics at WUR

Marnix Medema has been appointed Chair of the Bioinformatics Group at Wageningen University & Research as of 1 February. He aims to further strengthen bioinformatics as a connecting discipline within ...

wur.nl

Oh wow. Overleaf is now pushing an AI assistant on their platform as well. It just gave me a "grammar/style suggestion" that changed the order of magnitude of a number. 1024 is not 10,024, thank you very much.

Ok, who of you jokers wrote this app that thinks -56 minutes is a transfer time that OSS fine not to spite alternative connections for?

Feels funny to sit in a train from Stuttgart to Cologne again after over a decade. I’ve been doing that every Monday morning for over a year as a postdoc. Sprinting to catch my connection from Tübingen was on brand, too. I’ll just go on to our MAGIC-Molfun conference in Belgium this time around.

very sad news. Peer Bork was one of the leaders of our field, a wonderful scientist, and he's much too young to be gone. www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

In remembrance of Peer Bork  | EMBL

EMBL and its community are deeply saddened by the death of Peer Bork, the organisation’s Interim Director General.

embl.org

i do not recommend allowing your children to play fortnite. this is not the only reason but you shouldn't need others

Matt Potter@mattpotteruk.bsky.social · 7mo ago

This is a wild hill to die on for someone who creates environments for kids. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games (Fortnite/Battle Royale) argues against CP protections on social media/AI platforms, claiming legislators are ‘just censoring political opponents’. www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

Made the rookie mistake of opening linkedin. Saw a professor from Princeton claim that the step from manual coding to vibe coding is the same control vs. productivity tradeoff as C to Python, assembler to C, or machine code to assembler. 1/n

Dear journal editor: Inviting me to review a paper on Christmas Eve and then sending a nag email about that on the 26th is the best way to get me to decline that invitation. If your system is being stupid automatically, get a better automated system. Tell the publisher to use those APCs for it.

Welcome to another member of the antiSMASH ecosystem of tools. When @marnixmedema.bsky.social and I were putting together antiSMASH version 1.0 15 years ago, I don't think our wildest dreams would have predicted where our little tool would go.

Anders Ogechi Hostrup Daugberg@andersohd.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Merry X-SMASH! My first first author paper is out on bioRxiv! 🖥 We present epsSMASH, a comprehensive and high-throughput tool for predicting exopolysaccharide (exoPS) biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in bacterial genomes 🦠🧬🧫 1/8

Once in a while, you publish an article that fundamentally redefines your research area. I believe this is one of those moments. I huge thanks to all contributors. 🎉

Anders Ogechi Hostrup Daugberg@andersohd.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Merry X-SMASH! My first first author paper is out on bioRxiv! 🖥 We present epsSMASH, a comprehensive and high-throughput tool for predicting exopolysaccharide (exoPS) biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in bacterial genomes 🦠🧬🧫 1/8

A little Christmas gift for the molecular biology nerds! I love the simplicity of this idea: very useful (and small) plasmid selection system that alleviates the need for antibiotics in molbio and bioprocesses. Elegant work by my former PhD student, lab, and colleagues: doi.org/10.1021/acss...

tRNA-Mediated Plasmid Stabilization for Antibiotic-Free Applications in Escherichia coli

Plasmids are essential tools in molecular biology and biotechnology. In research laboratories, it is common to use antibiotic selection markers to ensure that plasmids are stably maintained in a cellu...

doi.org

Apparently, all my Sonos speakers at home decided some days ago to automatically crank their volume up in the middle of the night to make sure that you really wake up in the morning. A bit of digging shows that there's a log file on a device web page to debug which source is responsible. 1/?