Four principles to establish a universal virus taxonomy journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar… It was a wonderful experience to share a workshop with world experts on virus diversity, genomics and classification.

Impact of microbial genome completeness on metagenomic functional inference | ISME Communications nature.com/articles/s4370…

Working from home today, but not without close supervision

Is it acceptable yet to have a cat/pet in your professional headshot? (The only recent pics I have of just me currently without alcohol)

Still looking for a postdoc in soil viral ecology, start date flexible, bioinformatics/omics background useful but you don't need virology experience, apply by March 6 if possible

Do you have a crappy phage? Do you have 4 days? We found that we could rapidly evolve our bacteriophages to increase low titers by 100-10,000 times in only four days! In many cases, the host ranges expanded at the same time! Amazing! Try it! #Phage #Evolution Danielle Kok

In nature today (open access), we report the structural and mechanistic basis of how bacteria harvest energy from air. We reveal a novel enzyme, Huc, consumes atmospheric levels of hydrogen gas and transfers the derived electrons for aerobic respiration. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Excited to share our new preprint! Phage tRNA act as a counter to the Retron defense system, and Rad is a broad-spectrum retron inhibitor. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Casually asked my friend “do you know Bob’s Red Mill flour?” , and just realized the full depths of my baking addiction mindset

I’m sure I’m not the first to ask this, but if Pseudomonas exists, who is the real monas?

New paper alert!🌋🌊🧬🦠 I'm so excited to share our paper "Viruses interact with hosts that span distantly related microbial domains in dense hydrothermal mats" 1/ nature.com/articles/s4156…

Can large language models understand genomic sequences and uncover new biology? 🧬🧬🧬 Excited to share a new #preprint with Sergey Ovchinnikov, Andre Cornman, and Pierre Deep Sea. TLDR: A Large Language Model for genomic sequences! #genomics #AI #machinelearning #NLP biorxiv.org/content/10.110… 1/

Instead of asking “did you feed the cat her wet food?”, we ask “were you the hero today?” And I’m only now realizing how sad it is that we have to exaggerate our importance to her to convince ourselves she needs us bc cats

How tf didn’t the UK or Ukraine or Slovenia or Austria get more points????

Super cool paper from Ernie Osburn, Gaowen Yang Matthias C. Rillig and @strickm27 showing that alpha-diversity relationships with soil ecosystem function are non-causal.

How many SAR11 cells are phage-infected in the environment? And what are zombies🧟‍♂️? We studied phage infection in SAR11 using the🔬. Up to 19% of SAR11 cells were phage infected and many host cells were devoid of ribosomes🧟‍♂️! What else did we find? A 🧵 researchsquare.com/article/rs-407…

Congrats to Tianyi Chang @julesinboots Ramunas Stepanauskas on helping the environmental microbiology community better understand the strengths and weaknesses of SAGs versus MAGs! Using either/both data types? Read this to more accurately interpret your data link.springer.com/article/10.118…

What if we could put all tailed phages in a single, evolutionarily meaningful phylogeny? Check out the latest from the Aylward Lab (twitterless) and myself - we present a phylogenomic framework toward unifying phage diversity! 🧬🤝 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…