Daniel Goldhill

Finished a virology PhD or finishing soon? Check out this job - www.healthjobsuk.com/job/UK/Londo...

Ecology and spread of the North American H5N1 epizootic - Nature The panzootic of highly pathogenic H5N1 since 2021 was driven by around nine introductions into the Atlantic and Pacific flyways, followed by rapid dissemination through wild migratory birds, primaril...

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

www.preprints.org?

Longitudinal analysis of influenza A virus deletion-containing viral genomes reveals key determinants of co-evolutionary dynamics and interference The substantial genetic diversity generated during influenza A virus replication facilitates both evasion of pre-existing host immunity and cross-species emergence. A major contributor to this diversi...

First big piece of research from our SG lab: Fadi's work with Chris Brooke's lab. Flu serially passaged 80X selects a defective genome with improved competition, but is nonviable as a full virus!
Notable improvement & safety for DVGs as antiviral RNA therapies!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A diagram depicting a PhD project whereby editing salmon cells or ova leads to viral resistance from ISAV.

If you are looking for a PhD in the UK, please check out the LIDo program - www.lido-dtp.ac.uk/apply.
If you are interested in viruses and making genetically edited salmon, please look up my icase project.
International students are welcome to apply!
Please reach out if you have questions.

Our new preprint is out 🥳🥳🥳

Henipaviruses, like Nipah and Hendra, package their genomes inside helical shells built by thousands of nucleoproteins. These nucleocapsids are essential to protect the viral RNA, but how do they ever let the polymerase in to read the sequence?

👇

Guys- new spillover route just dropped.

warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa...

I am advertising for a PhD position in my group. We'll be investigating how pathogenic RNA viruses replicate in the nucleus. The project will teach cryoEM/ET, virus culture, and in vitro assays.

If you're interested reach out and I'd be happy to have a chat.

UK’s arm’s length public bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation Seven in ten Britons say it is important for top scientific institutions to be independent in exclusive new polling.

🧵🚨

The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news.

Today our report is published!
www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

1/11

My stomach churned as I saw the news: it was my old Shul in my home city Emma Barnett’s shock at today’s terrorist attack was amplified when the presenter realised it had taken place where her family once worshipped

www.thetimes.com/life-style/c...

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

Near real-time data on the human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza virus to inform vaccine-strain selection in September 2025 The hemagglutinin of human influenza virus evolves rapidly to erode neutralizing antibody immunity. Twice per year, new vaccine strains are selected with the goal of providing maximum protection again...

In new study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social, we provide near real-time data on human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza by measuring ~26,000 titers to >100 recent viral strains

Data can inform vaccine selection & evolutionary/epidemiological modeling
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The 16th Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in Bulape Health Zone, Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo: A new spillover event from an unknown reservoir host Background The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is currently facing concurrent outbreaks including mpox, cholera and malaria (1-4). The Ministry of Public Health, DRC has declared the 16th Ebola...

In under 24h following the newly identified outbreak of #Ebola in the DRC, the virus has been isolated, sequenced and the virus sequence data made publicly available.
virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

About time!

Genetic reassortment and diversification of host specificity have driven evolutionary trajectories of lineages of panzootic H5N1 influenza Since 2021, subclade 2.3.4.4b A(H5N1) high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) viruses have undergone changes in ecology and epidemiology, causing a panzootic of unprecedented scale in wild and domes...

Really excited to have been a part of this study, lead by @willharv.bsky.social on how reassortment of H5N1 in birds has lead to a 'specialist' genotype that thrives in seabirds and drives summer/spring (rather than winter) waves of poultry outbreaks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Research Assistant in Vaccine Immunology at Imperial College London Discover Research Assistant in Vaccine Immunology jobs and more in higher education on jobs.ac.uk. Apply for further details on the top job board.

We have a new research assistant role co-supervised with @cjohansson-lab.bsky.social

Working on #vaccines and #immunology

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOH045/r...

@imperialmed.bsky.social

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

Want to move to Switzerland? We are looking for a postdoc to study airborne viruses:
careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...

@linseymarr.bsky.social @lakdawalalab.bsky.social @corsiaq.bsky.social @influenzal.bsky.social @chuckhaas.bsky.social

This is quite late but our lab has a preprint out about a SARS-CoV-2 situation we had in mink in Lithuania back in 2021. It's a doozy with re-emergence of extinct lineages, a country-wide test of all mink farms in Lithuania & some interesting dynamics in mink. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/5🧵

Something a little different.
If you're looking for interesting science to engage with older school children, I would like to plug my students' work on cow flu - where it came from and what risk it might pose.
doi.org/10.1042/bio_...

PS> Not peer reviewed but was fun to help write!

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Latest preprint from the lab, many years in the making!

By combining #cryoEM with #AlphaFold3 modelling, we propose that norovirus NS3 forms a transmembrane RNA translocase.

This could have big implications for our understanding of viral replication & assembly (🧵)

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

Another beautiful figure from Capelastegui & Goldhill 2025. Pandemic staircase adapted from Long et al. 2019 showing the transition of AIV to the human seasonal virus. Key steps for mammalian and human adaptation are polymerase changes, HA mutations which confer α2,6 sialic acid preference and finally fine-tuning of viral fitness.

If you are interested in influenza emergence, please check out and use the beautiful figures all made by @fcapelastegui.bsky.social.

A beautiful figure. Global detections of A(H5N1) clade 2.3.4.4b in mammalian species, split by sporadic detections (black) and detections which are associated with an outbreak (orange) alongside key mammalian adaptive mutations. Taken from Capelastegui & Goldhill 2025.

Excited to present the first review from my lab!
Which mutations allow H5 influenza to jump into humans or other mammals? How close is H5 to a pandemic? This review has the answers and explains the molecular mechanism behind the mutations.
Led by @fcapelastegui.bsky.social.
doi.org/10.1099/jgv....

This is a really friendly meeting for influenza virologists. Great for PhD students and anyone else working on flu.

Should you drink flu-infected raw milk? Obviously no but now you can put numbers on how bad an idea this is.

Finishing virology/biology PhD students, postdocs in need of a job- this is a lab you should join! Am I biased? 100% yes- because I know that the Sheppard lab will be an awesome place to work and you'll do great science. Spread the word!

We are currently seeking an ambitious, motivated, and hard-working scientist to join my lab (wrobel-lab.org) at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Oxford as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. If interested, please go here directly: tinyurl.com/postdoc-wrob... or read more below.

On a Nature news article reporting that NIH planned to suspend subawards for foreign collaborations: “No, that’s false. There’s going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money’s going.” “I’m really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you’re like, actually spreading rumors that you don’t know anything about. … Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that’s not true.” “We’re working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn’t be reporting rumors. I know there’s leaks all over here, but the leaks don’t actually reflect what’s happening. Don’t write about rumors. It actually makes the things that you and I care about worse. Like it spreads panic.” Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.

With NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya dismissing my reporting as "false" and "spreading rumors" hours before releasing a policy that confirmed said "rumors," I feel compelled to respond.

Here's an inside look into how this story was reported. It was a weird one. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/d41...