Simon Roux

Vast scale of overseas human remains held in UK museums decried by MPs and experts Exclusive: Guardian study finds UK museums hold more than 260,000 items of remains, often in sacrilegious ways

'Lord Paul Boateng said the findings exposed UK museums and universities as “imperial charnel houses where the bones of Indigenous peoples torn from Britain’s empire in the past, with little or no regard...continue to be retained to this day in circumstances that beggar belief”.'

The School of Biosciences at University of Birmingham is recruiting FIVE Assistant/Associate Profs in areas including fungal biology, plant science and bioengineering. Full details below 🍄🌾🧬🧫

I've created this Starter Pack to help those with an interest in all things #soil find inspiring people, organisations, and platforms that regularly post content on #SoilScience, #SoilManagement, and #SoilGovernance. 🌱🧑🏻‍🌾🌾

Let me know if you wish to be added.

go.bsky.app/HADDT8P

Un poste MCF en génomique évolutive / écologie moléculaire à ECOBIOP - Université de Pau #PopGen 👇
urlr.me/rVQmN6

Viruses in marine sediments: a review of their effect on biogeochemistry and microbial interactions | Applied and Environmental Microbiology In the ocean, viruses are known to mediate the carbon cycle, keeping dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the microbial loop and preventing its movement into secondary consumers (1). However, few direct ...

New paper out! We sat down and compiled all viral work in marine sediments. The water column has been getting a second look for viral interactions, its time for sediment to have the same!
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

🧫 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: "AssiST: Convolutional neural network for analysis of antibiotic susceptibility testing" 

Read the full paper here:  https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbag063

Authors include: @carmenli.bsky.social, @amitchell.bsky.social

CRISPR targeting seems to suggest it's definitely not as "rare" as we may have thought, especially in situations like micro-aggregates, etc

➡️ preprint from the lab! Bacteria have loads of antiviral defences in their mobile genetic elements (MGEs). So when MGEs move between bacteria, the defences move with them, generating a fast turnover of defences in bacteria. But what about the antiviral defence turnover in the MGEs themselves? 🤔

🧵👇

This scalability unlocks extensive cross-proteome discovery. By querying viral proteomes against host genomes, FlashPPI identifies host-virus interactions involving previously uncharacterized proteins. 6/

Predicting protein-protein interactions (PPIs) at proteome scale can take months with co-folding models due to the massive all-vs-all comparisons required.

We are excited to announce FlashPPI, a contrastive learning framework that predicts proteome wide physical interfaces in minutes. 1/🧵

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

The Voyageurs Wolf Project of Northern Minnesota tags & documents grey wolf ecology & behavior: www.voyageurswolfproject.org

The video you see here is confirmatory proof:
Wolves. Love. Blueberries.

As much as 83% of a wolf's calories in summer months comes from eating berries.

🔔Seminar Opportunity🔔

We're looking for (self)recommendations for a Postdoc who is working in the area of AMR (any area, any discipline) to give an online seminar in May.

Reply, DM or email me, there will more opportunities in the future as well so will be good to have a list.

#MicroSky #AMR

Posting again!

Given that clonal biofilms of single bacterial species rapidly diversify into niche specialists, how do biofilms of multiple species evolve?
A 🧵 featuring new collaborative pubs:
1. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
2. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is brilliant

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

These wee birds are just zen

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

I have the same cat

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

But this is so new that we 100% need more perspective and "cautionary tales" from people who have looked at these data in detail and thought deeply about these questions !!

"not perfect" for prophages either, "very not perfect" for lytic viruses 😁
We touch on this a bit in our "host prediction" review www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
and the Sullivan lab has done benchmarking that highlights the potential noise in these data
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Also, g’damnit I need to write up the “Hi-C is not perfect when identifying plasmids and host cells” paper

New @plosbiology.org code sharing policy. In this Editorial, @npariente.bsky.social and Lauren Cadwallader explain the policy and offer guidance on compliance, noting that code sharing remains less well understood than equivalent requirements for data and ethics.

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

We’re recruiting new Research Group Leaders!
We offer:
🔬 Core funding
💻 Access to world-leading infrastructure
👩🏽‍🔬A network of world-leading scientists
…and much more.
Apply by 11 April: embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...
#ResearchCareers #Bioinformatics @timcoorens.bsky.social @embl.org