A mutation in a strain of measles allowed it to go undetected by common targeted sequencing surveillance 🧬. The assay has now been updated to detect the mutant 🖥️. Targeted sequencing is incredibly sensitive but it must be supported by genomic surveillance to keep the targets up to date 🧪🦠

During London tube strikes, commuters had to change their underground route 🚇. 5% preferred their new route and kept using it after the strikes were over. What changes have you kept after forced exploration?

Slow growing bacterial infections are not just a challenge for id and culture. Their slow growth also makes treatment slower. Mycobacterium malmoense 🦠 takes 2 months to grow on a plate and 2 years of antibiotics to treat. 🧪

For students who look to LLMs for help with their code but run into usage limits, running an open-weight LLM locally doesn't use up that much storage space and may have similar latency as cloud solutions -- and easy to connect to Positron, VSCode, and others. www.xda-developers.com/self-hosting...

I started self-hosting an LLM, and it became my favorite productivity tool

I installed a local LLM for privacy, but the biggest surprise was how much faster it made my daily workflow.

xda-developers.com

New Zealand has become the last place to detect 2.3.4.4b bird flu (high pathogenicity H5N1). After even Antarctica (2023). 🧪 It's a worry for their native birds, but they've been proactively preparing by vaccinating endangered birds. 💉🦜

Just an incredible achievement to get a new vaccine to clinical trial in just 8 weeks. Obviously still lots to do, but this shows what pandemic preparedness is capable of. 🧪💉 www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-07-13-worlds-first-phase-i-bundibugyo-ebolavirus-vaccine-trial-launched-by

Is there mould on the international space station 🚀🦠? I analyzed DNA from the ISS dinner table 🧬🖥️, my favorite find was lots of kimchi bacteria. Kimchi went to space, but the bacteria was killed first. 🧪 Why do you think kimchi bacteria doing so well in space? towardsdatascience.com/space-mould/

Identifying Microbes in Space | Towards Data Science

What's living on the International Space Station?

towardsdatascience.com

What's living on the international space station dinner table? I used metagenomics to investigate and found a tasty surprise! 🧪🧬🖥️This blog walks through the code, what microbes I found, and how kraken2 works towardsdatascience.com/space-mould/

Identifying Microbes in Space | Towards Data Science

What's living on the International Space Station?

towardsdatascience.com

Find this mouth in the garden recently. Can anybody help me to ID? Plants 🌱🇬🇧 #bugsky

My new favorite website map.blitzortung.org 🌩️⚡ not just for awesome live data vis but for the collaboration of weather nerds building lightning detectors and sharing the data

*looks sceptical in perl* 🐪🧬🖥️🧪

raw9371@raw937.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Python got bioinformatics started. Rust will scale it. 🦀 Today we released rustyomestats, our first Rust crate for genome assembly statistics. Fast. Memory safe. Built for massive genomic datasets. Crates: lnkd.in/dP88c83F GitHub: lnkd.in/dDw2KNuX Rust is the way. #RustLang #Bioinformatics

Delighted to share some good news 🧪 “This hugely encouraging news shows the life-saving impact of the HPV vaccine, and it’s incredibly exciting to be able to say to this whole generation: cervical cancer shouldn’t be a risk for you,” says Caroline Temmink www.newscientist.com/article/2530...

No young women have died of cervical cancer in England for years

We already know the vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV, greatly reduces infections and cases of cervical cancer, and now we have the first evidence it prevents deaths too

newscientist.com

Hantaviruses use "cap snatching" to start reading instructions from their genome. They cut up host mRNA and use that as primers for their own transcription. You can see this in their transcripts because they start with unrelated fragments of host sequence 🧪🧬🦠

New flu study shows that when you feel worse, you're probably spreading more virus particles. 🧪In particular, coughing, runny nose, and feeling bleh were correlated with virus particles expelled into the air. #flu www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(26)00232-1

Controlled human influenza infection reveals heterogeneous expulsion of infectious virus into air

A platform called MIST enables quantification and genotyping of infectious influenza in expelled respiratory particles, revealing diverse, individual-specific viral loads and aerosolized variants that...

cell.com

In humans, sub unit vaccines are often designed around predicted t cell epitopes. What you would focus on in species without an adaptive immune response is such an interesting question! 🧬🖥️🧪

Hannah Thomasy@hannahthomasy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is super interesting - I never thought about whether you could vaccinate animals without an adaptive immune system 🧪

Using open source resources viralrecon and pathoplexus, it only took 3 days from declaring an outbreak to reporting the viral genomes as district from previous Bundinugyo outbreaks. 🖥️🧬 virological.org/t/initial-ge...

Initial genomes from May 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda

Initial genomes from May 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, reveal a new spillover event Context On 15 May 2026, the Ministry of Public Health, ...

virological.org

#philbio

Joanna Masel@joannamasel.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our new paper doi.org/10.1098/rspb... on long-term genetic threats to small populations finds that "mutational meltdown" (bad mutations fixing) is less of a problem than "mutational drought" (too few good new mutations) @wmawass.bsky.social @uliseshmc.bsky.social @jeremyjberg.bsky.social 1/5

The Indian muntjac deer only has 6 or 7 chromosomes, less than any other mammal 🦌 because in the last 5 million years their chromosomes have fused together 26 times! 🧬 🖥️ #chromosome #deer

I recently learnt that muntjac deer are native to South East Asia. At the start of the 1900s a handful escaped from a private collection at Woburn Abbey. Despite this population bottleneck, there are now over 100,000 in the UK

India’s genomic map reveals ~130M variants—many previously unknown. Strong population structure + rare, population-specific variants expose limits of Eurocentric datasets. Precision medicine needs diversity, not assumptions. #Genomics #PrecisionMedicine #HumanDiversity tinyurl.com/3mverx3p

India’s DNA map uncovers millions of missing genetic variants

A vast study reveals deep diversity, hidden disease risks and exposes the limits of Eurocentric medicine.

tinyurl.com

Very happy to say that the 🧬 🖥️ tool HLAfreq is now published doi.org/10.21105/joss.10122 Use it to combine HLA allele frequency datasets. I made it to help vaccine design but love seeing it put to other uses. Let me know if it's useful to you! 🧪 #hlafreq

HLAfreq: Download and combine HLA allele frequency data

Wells et al., (2026). HLAfreq: Download and combine HLA allele frequency data. Journal of Open Source Software, 11(121), 10122, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.10122

doi.org

The USDA pomological watercolors are a beautiful catalog of fruit in America. I made this figure to show which fruit are in that collection. The bigger the fruit the more times it features in the collection. It is full of apples 🍎🍏! Made with #figtreemap #sciart #apples

The USDA phonological watercolors are a collection of beautiful botanical illustrations I've been admiring. Exploring then was made much easier thanks to pomological.art/. Are there any similar collections of animal scientific illustrations you'd recommend? #sciart

USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

Explore over 7,500 historical watercolor paintings of fruits and vegetables from the USDA Pomological Collection, featuring rare varieties from 1886-1942.

pomological.art

Exploring cancer types with neo4j, a guide to identifying clusters in knowledge graphs 🧬🖥️🧪 @neo4j.com medium.com/data-science...

Exploring cancer types with neo4j

How to identify and visualise clusters in knowledge graphs

medium.com

📢Introducing GENOTIPE, HIS Special Interest Group. 🧬GENOTIPE brings together the expertise needed to turn genomic innovation into practical and sustainable use within healthcare settings, aligned with NHS and public health priorities. 🔗More info: https://ow.ly/JMWY50YNm7k #Genomics #IPC #🧪

Computer scientists share their advice for ensuring that your scientific software does what it’s supposed to do go.nature.com/48wyHXp

Got bugs? Here’s how to catch the errors in your scientific software

Computer scientists share their advice for ensuring that your scientific software does what it’s supposed to do.

go.nature.com

Scientists have confirmed that group A strep can be identified in ancient remains. They found pathogen DNA in a prehispanic mummy from Bolivia — raising the question: Where did strep (and diseases like scarlet fever) originate? 🧪🏺

700-year-old mummy from Bolivia contains earliest confirmed evidence of strep throat bacteria in the Americas

A DNA analysis of pathogens from a pre-Hispanic mummy revealed that the bacterium that causes scarlet fever and strep throat was present in the Americas prior to European colonization.

livescience.com

The number of spaces missions per animal species 🐕🚀. Inspired by [animals in space](www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/gra...) made with [figtreemap](quantitative-omics-research.github.io/figtreemap/) #space

Gorgeous! Reminds me of ggpomological garrickadenbuie.com/project/ggpomological/#color-palette a beautiful colour palette and ggplot theme 🍎🍏

🍑 ggpomological: A Pomological ggplot2 Theme – Garrick Aden-Buie

A ggplot2 theme based on the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

garrickadenbuie.com

Niki Hubbard, PhD 🐙🦀@nikihubbard.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Once upon a time I just admired nudis and sea slugs. But it was not enough. Now apparently I'm creating an R package to celebrate their colour palettes? 😅 First up, my Sydney fave, Hypselodoris bennetti. #rstats #nudibranch #dataviz 🦑🐙🧪 #marinelife #invertebrates

Of course, that's great because I love White-throated Sparrows so much. Did you know that their two color morphs aren't actually the male and female plumages (as some old field guides say)? Thanks to a genetic quirk, they've basically got 4 sexes! www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disa...

The Bird with Four Sexes

Find out what a strange little sparrow can teach us about love, sex, and human biology.

sciencehistory.org

SK Winnicki, PhD 🏳️‍⚧️@skwinnicki.bsky.social · 4mo ago

There were over 100 million birds in the air over the US last night and they were apparently all White-throated Sparrows and they all ended up in Columbus Ohio (so so many around town today)