Ashleigh Griffin

Meet the Scots pensioner keeping the Gaza aid flotilla sailing The retired marine engineer was only supposed to be in Barcelona to help prepare boats travelling as part of the international aid mission.

Luckily Greta had my Uncle James on her team 🫶 www.sundaypost.com/fp/jim-griff...

Just finished another year of LS8 panel duty for @erc.europa.eu CoG awards. Well done to everyone who applied. Even the task of putting something together for one of these is a huge achievement. 💪🏼 Ecology and Evolution is alive and kicking in Europe!

Exciting delivery waiting on my doorstep today! Thank you, @joanstrassmann.bsky.social

We are hiring! Oxford biology has three associate professorships available as we move to new state-of-the-art facilities

Join us in our swanky new pad... @biology.ox.ac.uk www.biology.ox.ac.uk/article/we-a...

Thats brilliant! Congratulations Rachel!

We will be in the exhibition hall @eseb2025.bsky.social!

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@agonzalezvoyer.bsky.social @maxreuter.bsky.social @ebablab.bsky.social @vakirlis.bsky.social @arnaudlerouzic.bsky.social @francescaraffini.bsky.social @masahitotsuboi.bsky.social

This is wonderful news. Congratulations Cait and Salma!

With #eseb2025 coming to a close, it is time to start making plans for 2026. Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Come to our #ExE conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall. Leave your email address at tinyurl.com/EvolxEcol to join our mailing list!

Mike Ritchie at podium in front of Alice showing St Andrews seascape

Wit, warmth and charm in presidential address from fellow Dundonian and Edinburgh alumnus Mike Ritchie. (Lovely shout-out to Aubrey Manning) Perfect ending to @eseb2025.bsky.social Support your society journal! @jevbio.bsky.social @journal-evo.bsky.social @evolletters.bsky.social

Evidence that lifestyle drives genome fluidity from @annadewar.bsky.social today. Keeping everyone going on last day of @eseb2025.bsky.social! Great talk Anna!

Brilliant plenary today from Carrisa de Bekker @zombieantdoc.bsky.social at @eseb.bsky.social conference. On her work funded by @erc.europa.eu CoG. Great example of inter-disciplinary collaboration to solve a mystery..

Global hotspots of mycorrhizal fungal richness are poorly protected - Nature Machine-learning algorithms trained on 25,000 geolocated soil samples are used to create high-resolution global maps of mycorrhizal fungi, revealing that less than 10% of their biodiversity hotspots a...

Where are mycorrhizal fungi and are the protected? (spoiler alert - no, they aren't) www.nature.com/articles/s41... @tobykiers.bsky.social

Who lives underground?

Find out now in our new paper published in @nature.com.

Key finding: 90% of predicted mycorrhizal biodiversity hotspots lie outside protected areas.

Read here: buff.ly/WmDqAP3 🧵

Most of Earth’s critical underground fungus is unprotected First global map of mushrooms that form beneficial relationships with plant roots reveals 90% live outside of conservation areas

SPUN is featured in @science.org in a piece written by @humbertobasilio.bsky.social. Learn where some of the most unique fungal communities exist, such as West Africa’s Guinean forests, Tasmania’s temperate rainforests, and Brazil’s Cerrado savanna.

Read here: www.science.org/content/arti...

3/3 Funding for the workshop provided by iTHEMS & JSPS. @asgriffin.bsky.social and I used the exercises from 'Scientific Papers Made Easy' with @queensoxbiology.bsky.social: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

YouTube video by Linnean Society One-Way Mirror in the Room: How Language Barriers Impede Conservation | Tatsuya Amano

2/3 Some great science posters by attendees, plus a superb online lecture by @tatsuya-amano.bsky.social‬ on language barriers in scientific communication - both the challenges and the solutions. Link for a previous talk he gave at ‪@linneansociety.bsky.social‬: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS08...

Group Photo

Discussion in groups

1/3 I was just lucky enough to get to do a couple of sessions on scientific writing in a DEI & Writing Workshop at Riken, Tokyo. Huge thank you to @ryosukeiritani.bsky.social for organising such an open and supportive workshop, and all the attendees for being so engaged and interactive.

The scientific writing sessions were run with @stuwest.bsky.social and based on his and Lindsay Turnbull @queensoxbiology.bsky.social book - "Scientific paper writing made easy" by @oupacademic.bsky.social

The DEI workshop session I ran was based on an interactive format that I designed with the wonderful Amy Hinks of the EDU @ox.ac.uk. Please get in touch if you would like to swap tips about how best to run something like this. I'd love to hear from you.

Thank you to everyone attending the "Writing and DEI Workshop" at RIKENS, organized by @ryosukeiritani.bsky.social. Gender equality in STEM is a global issue and we need to share our experiences and learn from one another. Thank you for sharing your stories and enthusiasm! 🙏 and @ITHEms, @JSPS 🇯🇵❤️

Read about Jun’s incredible work solving melitobia’s mysteries here: www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Family field trip with Jun Abe 🫶to trap parasitoids and wolbachia-infected butterflies on Kyushu Island. Hard to imagine science being more fun. Big thank you to Kanagawa University and JSPS Kakenhai for supporting the trip; Ethan and Olive for doing most of the catching! 👐💛 @stuwest.bsky.social

🐠💥2 year postdoc in fish sensory ecology!! 💥🐟
If you’re into animal colour, collective behaviour, predator-prey interactions, enjoy behavioural experiments and fieldwork, please apply! Based in Oxford with fieldwork in northwest Thailand (and elsewhere). Please repost! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNM294/p...

In his #ParentCarerScientist case study, Professor Ben Sheldon FRS talks about navigating crises at home and at work, and why it's important for leaders to set an example when it comes to balancing work with caring responsibilities: #CarersWeek #AndAScientist royalsociety.org/about-us/who...

Cooking lesson!

Ryosuke Iritani, Stuart West, Ashleigh Griffin, Hisashi Ohtsuki

Thank you to our host, Hisashi Ohtsuki at the Research Centre for Integrative Evolutionary Science, SOKENDAI, for hosting us this week. We felt so welcome and loved hearing about your work. (And learning to make okonomiyaki!) @stuwest.bsky.social

Profs David Coltman, Geoff Wild and Stuart West pose uncertainly in bold patterned shirts.

Thank you to everyone at University of Western Ontario, Department of Biology; especially David Coltman💋 and @geoffwild.bsky.social for hosting us on sabbatical. Crazy weather, crazy times: Never 51! 🇨🇦❤️ @stuwest.bsky.social

Microbiology Society Microbiology Society journals contain high-quality research papers and topical review articles. We are a not-for-profit publisher and we support and invest in the microbiology community, to the benefi...

To all enjoying #MicroBio25 remember: all @microbiologysociety.org events rely on our journals - every paper pays 4x travel grants!

Make 2025 when you submit a paper to a MicroSoc journal www.microbiologyresearch.org

$0 OA for Publish+Read institutions www.microbiologyresearch.org/publish-and-...

How was dinner?!

Table 1 | Many studies have successfully used viral cheats to combat viruses in vivo, observing reduction in clinical severity, or even complete protection from viral challenge

Cheat therapy turns out to be highly effective at treating viruses in vivo. The question is no longer 'can it work?', but rather 'how do we do it safely?'

We discuss why cheats seem to work better in viruses than in bacteria, and the next steps for bringing cheat therapy to the clinic.

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Fig. 2 | Successful viral infections require the production of shared gene products. Two common examples include replicase enzymes for replicating the viral genome (here in yellow) or capsid protein subunits required for building the viral capsid (herein blue). These gene products can be exploited by non-producing mutants, called cheats, which benefit from them without contributing. A Cheat mutants often arise spontaneously, when error-prone replication results in shorter viral genomes which lack the regions that encode shared gene products. B In coinfection, these cheat mutants exploit gene pro-ducts encoded by full-length, cooperative viruses.Over the course of a cellular infection, cheats can out-compete full-length viruses by up to 10,000:1, even driving extinction of the viral population.

Bacteria and viruses often rely on shared molecules, or 'public goods'. Mutants can emerge that do not produce these molecules, but still benefit from them. These 'cheat' mutants can naturally invade populations... but could we also deploy cheats deliberately as a new type of therapeutic?

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