Jayna Raghwani

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals Host body temperature can define a virus’s replicative profile—influenza A viruses (IAVs) adapted to 40° to 42°C in birds are less temperature sensitive in vitro compared with human isolates adapted t...

🚨New Paper!🚨
Some like it hot: Matt Turnbull and @samjwilsonphd.bsky.social collaborated with groups from @cvrinfo.bsky.social, @cam.ac.uk and beyond to show that, while our fevers are hot enough to control human flu, they don't protect against avian influenzas adaptd to the hotter bodies of birds

My 1st first-author paper is out as a preprint! Excited to share the fascinating story of marine-feeding vampire bats 🌊🦇 We found that marine-diet bats were exposed to #H5#AvianFlu 🦠 from marine wildlife and could potentially spread it to livestock via blood feed🩸
doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.09.686930

cc: @microbiologysociety.org

Quantifying viral load and characterizing virus diversity in wildlife samples with target enrichment sequencing Metagenomics is a powerful tool for characterizing viruses, with broad applications across diverse disciplines, from understanding the ecology and evolutionary history of viruses to identifying causat...

Excited to share that our paper on the relationship between viral load and metagenomic outputs in wildlife samples is now published in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety! 🎉 Fantastic collaboration with a brilliant team.

More info: 📖 tinyurl.com/ywb7tvjm

Efficient sequence alignment against millions of prokaryotic genomes with LexicMap - Nature Biotechnology LexicMap uses a fixed set of probes to efficiently query gene sequences for fast and low-memory alignment.

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians.
It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social
joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical.
While here, he developed a new way of aligning to
millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Top: Experimental design depicting the passage experiment and the methods for quantifying infection prevalence, shedding ability, and infection prevalence in spillover populations. Middle: Host strains are ordered by the number of virus-positive plates over the course of the experiment (positive control C. elegans strain JU1580 set farthest right). Passage 0 denotes the exposure population. Note that the extraction procedure for passage 0 plates was different from the subsequent passages; many adult worms were removed from passage 0 populations to measure infection prevalence, intensity, and shedding (see methods). Bottom: Strains differed in epidemiological characteristics including B) maximum likelihood prevalence of infection, C) infection intensity (corrected median Ct), D) maximum likelihood shedding ability (the probability that 1 infected worm could cause visible fluorescence on a shedding plate), and E) relative susceptibility.

Will a #virus spillover into a new host species lead to dead-end infection or sustained #epidemic? This study uses a nematode-virus model to show that early #spillover traits, especially infection prevalence & shedding, are important predictors of viral persistence @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3UCnZHp

Synchronized seasonal excretion of multiple coronaviruses coincides with high rates of coinfection in immature bats - Nature Communications Bats harbor diverse coronaviruses but temporal dynamics are less well studied. Here, the authors analyzed coronaviruses in Australian flying foxes over 3 years showing peak shedding and co-infections ...

🦇 NEW RESEARCH: Our 3-year study of Australian flying foxes identified six co-circulating coronaviruses, with highest rates of infection and co-infection in young bats, and evidence of circulating recombinants 🧪🌏 🧵

Available open access in @natcomms.nature.com

📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Atomic-resolution structure of a chimeric Powassan tick-borne flavivirus The 2.8-Å resolution structure is presented for a chimeric construct of an emerging tick-borne flavivirus, Powassan virus.

New in @science.org
We built a safe, atomic-resolution version of the Powassan virus—a deadly tick-borne #flavivirus with no vaccine.
✅ First structure ever
✅ Safe to handle (BSL-2)
✅ Platform for vaccines & antivirals

Let me show you 🧵 (1/5)

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Are you doing a PhD or research Masters in Virology? Want to be part of a community of like-minded researchers from across the UK and Ireland?

We're excited to announce the first annual conference run by and for postgraduate research students in Virology. Please sign up, and please spread the word!

Interested in metagenomic virus discovery but don't know where to start? In collaboration with CERI and a group of virus discovery experts from around the world, we'll be running a 5 day hands-on workshop in virus discovery.
Find out more here: climade.health/2025/06/22/m...

Spinger Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

New from The Strain Team:
🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊

Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗).

Gross! 😀 1/n

#ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

We have a job going for a bioinformatician / computational biologist at the CVR in Glasgow. www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/computat...

Ecology and evolutionary trajectories of morbilliviruses in Neotropical bats - Nature Microbiology Investigations in wild bats and non-human primates in Brazil and Costa Rica inform about diverse Morbillivirus ecology in neotropical bats and host jumps, and about zoonotic potential of morbillivirus...

Ecology and evolutionary trajectories of morbilliviruses in Neotropical bats

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣🚨📣Deadline extended to 6th June 2025! 📣🚨📣
Applications are still open for our MSc+PhD scholarships in Ecological Data Science available to those from underrepresented groups. This offers fully funded MSc (full UK fees and UKRI stipend) followed by entry to our 4-year PhD programme.

Postdoc (Washington DC, USA)
Rodent-borne virus risk in heterogeneous landscapes
with @clfaust.bsky.social @jraghwani.bsky.social @bahanbug.bsky.social
at @ox.ac.uk @uofglasgow.bsky.social @royalvetcollege.bsky.social @ilri.org...
More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2307

BTO's Hugh Hanmer, Senior Research Ecologist, is a speaker at this webinar where he'll be discussing the decline in Blackbirds in the UK and the spread of Usutu virus. Sign up to attend on the link below. ⬇️

📣 We’re hiring! 2-yr postdoc at Smithsonian’s NZCBI on an NSF-funded project with partners incl. Glasgow, RVC, Uganda MOH, Cary Institute. Focus: land use change, rodent movement, human-rodent contact, modeling disease risk, w/ plenty of fieldwork in Uganda. Details: tinyurl.com/SINSFR

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in long-term persistent infections is hypothesised to be a major source of variants of concern (VOC). However, the linkage of intra-host variants into haplotypes that reflect v...

New preprint from Luke Snell from GSTT, Suzanne Pickering in my lab and Rui Galao, my colleague at KCL.

Here we examine in detail the evolution of the SARS CoV-2 spike in persistent infections, and essentially catch a potential variant in the act of developing. 1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just over a week left to the London Infection Ecology Network event at the RVC with a fantastic list of speakers. For further info and to grab your tickets: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-inf...

This free, in-person event is open to researchers based in London or nearby areas. The afternoon will feature a series of talks exploring exciting topics at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and infectious disease.

cc: @lien-london.bsky.social

London Infection and Ecology Meeting LIEN fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between ecology and health sciences, supporting inclusive research and innovation.

📣 Excited annouce that the next London Infection Ecology Network (LIEN)🦠🌎🧪🌳🌤️ in-person event is taking place on April 30th at the RVC (Camden)!

If you’d like to attend, please register for a free ticket via Eventbrite:
🔗 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-inf...

Wild house mice have a more dynamic and aerotolerant gut microbiota than laboratory mice - BMC Microbiology The mammalian gut microbiota is a complex microbial community with diverse impacts on host biology. House mice (Mus musculus) are the major model organism for research on mammals, but laboratory domes...

We compared gut microbiota across >800 lab and wild house mice. Wild mice have more diverse, aerotolerant, and dynamic microbiotas than their lab counterparts. See our latest paper here: bmcmicrobiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #gutmicrobiome #musmusculus #wildmice

EXCITING NEWS🥳! @isme-microbes.bsky.social is now sponsoring 3 travels grants worth EUR 500 each to support early career researchers presenting at the #RdRpSummit2025.
Abstract submissions & registrations are still open!✍️
More info at RdRp.io

We are excited to announce a support scheme for ECRs wishing to attend ESEB 2025 and participate in the WAME-sponsored symposium “Contribution of the microbiome to host adaptation and plasticity”

See here for more details and please share!

www.wamestn.com/eseb-2025

Hibecovirus (genus Betacoronavirus) infection linked to gut microbial dysbiosis in bats Abstract. Little is known about how zoonotic virus infections manifest in wildlife reservoirs. However, a common health consequence of enteric virus infect

Did you know coronavirus infections impact the gut microbial community of #bats? But the effect differs between viruses. Published in @ismepublications.bsky.social - Big team effort: @alice-risely.bsky.social @cdrosten.bsky.social @vmcorman.bsky.social et al. academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

We're looking for a PhD student to join us at Vilnius University in Lithuania. We work on RNA virus evolution computationally but we'd like to generate more mosquito RNA virus sequence data. Official ad: www.gmc.vu.lt/en/doctoral-.... Please share & continue reading if interested.

Uncovering the viral aetiology of undiagnosed acute febrile illness in Uganda using metagenomic sequencing - Nature Communications Acute febrile illness is common in sub-Saharan Africa and causative agents are often unknown. Here, the authors perform metagenomic sequencing on samples from patients with acute febrile illness in Ug...

New in Nature Comms: We applied metagenomic + targeted NGS to serum from febrile patients in Uganda. Post-COVID, LMICs have sequencing infrastructure that could be repurposed for pathogen discovery.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Prior experience with #phylodynamic analyses is also required. Details are coming soon.
#jobsearch #diseaseecology #epidemiology #AvianInfluenza #BirdFlu

There is a #postdoc position opportunity to work on #HPAI in France and Cambodia (fieldwork with Institut Pasteur du Cambodge). The qualifications and experience required are #disease #evolution, epidemiology, or related disciplines.

Land health: Preventing zoonoses spillover Most modern pandemics have their origins in diverse microbes carried by animal reservoirs, particularly in highly biodiverse tropical regions. Human activities, such as forest conversion and…

How does land use impact disease spillover? 🌍🦠 Join the "Land Health: Preventing Zoonoses Spillover" webinar on March 5 & hear #RESTOREID partner @clfaust.bsky.social discuss biodiversity, agriculture & disease risk.

📅 Join here: buff.ly/Il0EGeA

#OneHealth ‪@cp-trendsparasitol.bsky.social‬