Many congratulations to Steve Jones for getting an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant! It's the first StG for Vilnius University Life Sciences Center and hopefully one of many to come.

OpenFold - Several new insights gained from retraining Alphafold2 on a new implementation including that it does generalize to unseen folds. Plus several technical improvements that help this run on larger sequences.

How unequal is the global SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance? 🦠🧬 Our recently published Nature Communications article analysed how countries performed in the first two years of pandemic, both in terms of sequencing intensity and timeliness of surveillance. 🧵👇🏾 nature.com/articles/s4146…

Huge congrats to @scalene IMIBirmingham Uni of Birmingham for winning the W.H. Pierce early career award from @amiposts - in great company with JVT who was awarded an honorary fellowship appliedmicrobiology.org/publishing-res…

Substantial expansion of the Flaviviridae through transcriptome mining - lots of new viruses in amphibians, reptiles, and ray-finned fish. Transcriptome mining extends the host range of the Flaviviridae to non-bilaterians biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Tecovirimat is effective against human monkeypox virus in vitro at nanomolar concentrations By Gaëlle Frenois-Veyrat, Frédéric Iseni, Etienne Simon-Loriere, Jean-Nicolas Tournier & colleagues. @neovirtech, @simonlorierelab, @jeannicolastou1 nature.com/articles/s4156…

Bombali ebolavirus is distributed as far as Mozambique it turns out. It hasn't caused human disease (yet) but given that concurrent Ebola virus outbreaks have become common we should probably invest more in understanding the ecology of filoviruses. wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28…

PhD position available in my lab, to look at genetic evolution in self-fertilising species using mathematical models and computational methods. Deadline 18th January, to start September 2023 (or earlier if desired). Please RT! findaphd.com/phds/project/r…

"Chroma, give me the smallest possible protein with rRNA N-glycosylase activity that does not have billions of years' worth of evolutionary baggage that required every intermediate protein to carry out a beneficial function." Maybe worth starting to think about implications now?

NEW PAPERS!: Today our TWO review articles on the biodiversity of Madagascar were published in Science Magazine. This project included 84 co-authors and 50 institutions, born from an Antonelli Lab group meeting in 2020. Kew Science, Kew Madagascar & Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre led the papers.

Our new Fluscape work is out eLife - the journal. We reported long term intrinsic cycles in individual antibody responses against 21 A(H3N2) strains that were isolated between 1968 and 2014. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…

TV Dozhd had a planned hearing with the Latvian authorities, but their representatives appeared without an interpreter just expecting everyone there to speak Russian with them. Russian liberals are not imperialists at all.

Are you interested in delivering reliable evidence from observational health care data? Do you find computational statistics and data science fascinating? I'd like to hire you as a Postdoctoral Fellow, so please email me directly! (Phylodynamic opportunities also available)

Finishing my studies at NYU Journalism with a Fulbright scholarship this Tuesday. I would like to stay in New York, ideally, working as an assistant podcast producer. Please reach out if we can collaborate.

PRO/AH/EDR> Influenza (11): Taiwan, swine origin, H1N2v promedmail.org/promed-post/?i…

Segmented Flavis jingmenviruses were in our backyard all along.

Science is a marathon & there's no country that prospered by politicising science or rejecting their own scientists. Political capital built on an anti-science platform is difficult to spend in a future where everyone is worse off. Find me on mastodon (@[email protected]).