Phew, what a Monday already! One back to reviewers & our AirSeq out in Current Biology! In a collaboration between Science at the Natural History Museum, Earlham Institute & John Innes Centre we apply air metagenomics to crops. Our first in line of many AirSeq projects! A🧵below. cell.com/current-biolog…

💬 "We've shown that this approach allows you to monitor agriculturally significant pathogens over time. It means we can arm farmers with the data they need to prevent crop losses.” - Richard Leggett ➡️ okt.to/riHsp3 Science at the Natural History Museum Matthew Clark #AirSeq

AirSeq detects DNA of fungal pathogens in the air, allowing farmers to spray crops more efficiently, saving money and promoting more sustainable farming - science from NHM Matt Clark Matthew Clark with Earlham Institute

Am I the only person who every time they hear about RFK Junior driving a bear into Manhattan, immediately thinks of that old (60s) Moose story in Woody Allen's 1960s standup? youtu.be/xmnLRVWgnXU?si…

Thrilled to announce the release of CarpeDeam, the first assembler designed for ancient metagenomics! It tackles the challenges of ancient DNA with a Bayesian read overlap algorithm and introduces RYmers—novel kmers impervious to ancient DNA damage. 🧬 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Really pleased to see our paper developing exome capture in Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) published in @molecolgy resources, from our collaboration with Science at the Natural History Museum British Antarctic Survey 🐧 UEA School of Environmental Sciences and NERC Environmental Omics Facility. Here’s a thread on why we did this study

Very grateful to have been awarded the John Innes Foundation prize for Excellence in Science Communication. Especially pleased that it was alongside Becky Shaw who has always supported me in my SciComm journey 🌿

I remain of the view that the disengagement of academics from this forum was a hugely self-defeating gesture. It scuttled what had been an unprecedented resource for academic communication and a valuable platform for public outreach.

Our latest study developing a Snakemake framework for the assembly and phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial and ribosomal sequences from genome skims of museum collections is now published in Molecular Ecology with Science at the Natural History Museum onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

Museum collections are a vast repository of historical biological data that remains largely untapped as genetic resources due to challenges associated with DNA degradation and contamination. Our pipelines provide a method to sequence mitochondrial and ribosomal genes at scale.

The pipelines perform the batch assembly, annotation and phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial genomes and nuclear ribosomal genes in a robust and scalable way using snakemake.

We show that the toolkit can recover mitochondrial and ribosomal genes from poorly preserved museum specimens of the gastropod family Solariellidae.

A special thank you to everyone who attended the Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) hackathon in Leiden, testing the pipeline to help their efforts to barcode over 30,000 museum collections.

The code can be found here github.com/o-william-whit…, github.com/o-william-whit…, github.com/o-william-whit… which is ready to go with all dependencies managed by Snakemake. Pease do try it out on your own data and let me know how it goes!

KRILLGUARD is a Natural Environment Research Council funded project that uses genome sequencing of krill and comparisons with historic specimens at the Museum to investigate the impact of climate change on this keystone species. Matthew Clark with British Antarctic Survey 🐧 and Uni of East Anglia nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/…

Very happy to see anna-liisa laine's & my article out in Science Magazine today! We reveal that the more a plant species invests in defense, the less potential it has for growth. All made possible by lots of public data & amazing open science contributions! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

NEW PAPER: UKCropDiversity-HPC: A collaborative high-performance computing resource approach for sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation. Read open access paper ➡️ nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

New publication on the HPC resources shared between Niab Science James Hutton Institute Science at the Natural History Museum @KewScience @RBGE_Science SRUC University of St Andrews which is more efficient and aids collaboration - funded twice by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research ALERT

One of the coolest exhibits at the The Royal Society Summer School! LEGO model of Oxford Nanopore sequencing! Well done Beaulieu Biology #partnershipgrants

New BBSRC Transformative Research Technologies grant funded postdoc, combining CRISPR and nanopore sequencing. Based Science at the Natural History Museum ideal for a super molecular biologist, with coI Richard Leggett bringing additional nanopore bioinformatics expertise. Apply jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetail?…