Vignuzzi Lab

No bull: This Austrian cow has learned to use tools First evidence for tool use in cattle includes a skill previously seen only in humans and chimpanzees

watch this video for instant happiness
www.science.org/content/arti...

Frequent presymptomatic household transmission of influenza A but not influenza B virus - Nature Health Based on two waves of data collection from 748 households in Hong Kong, this analysis sheds light on the number of transmission events that occurred before manifestation of symptoms in influenza A and...

Frequent presymptomatic household transmission of influenza A but not influenza B virus

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A prophage-encoded abortive infection protein preserves host and prophage spread - Nature A Gifsy-1 prophage–encoded higher eukaryotes and prokaryotes nucleotide-binding protein, HepS, senses Siphoviridae infection, activates abortive defence by cleaving host transfer RNAs, blocks rival ph...

A prophage-encoded abortive infection protein preserves host and prophage spread www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Decoding influenza virus: From polymerase mechanisms to translational therapeutics
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thank you to the International Meeting on Respiratory Pathogens (IMRP) for hosting a dinner for the locals involved in the meeting held this year in Singapore.

A chance for Fadi and me to meet up with the national players in public health and clinical sciences.

Another thing I love about Singapore. Create fun spaces in public where people can interact. New installation of racket game net in Tanjong Pagar. Pick a racket or a pan !

YouTube video by Flagship Pioneering 2026 CEO Chat: Craig Williams, CEO of Apriori Bio

The future of vaccines is the future of vaccines itself!

Listen to Apriori Bio CEO Craig Williams lay out how new vaccines will improve public health and better outbreak response.
Our group is partnering with them in a match made in 🤩 science heaven 🤩.

youtu.be/iskugkfU2hc

Engineering a streamlined virus-like particle for programmable tissue-specific gene delivery - Nature Communications Virus-like particles (VLPs) offer powerful gene delivery but face limits in targeting and complexity. Here, the authors create a streamlined SFV-based VLP platform that delivers mRNA, protein, or RNP ...

Today, Fish Hui Xian Poh presented this work by groups at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. They dissected alpha virus SFV into nsPs, Capsid, Envelope to make VLPs for RNA or protein delivery - in some cases to target the blood-brain barrier. Very cool work!

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Hello my friend! Welcome back online!

A wonderful visit from Peggy, our lab’s retired admin assistant. She brought me my own name stamp in Chinese characters handmade in Shanghai ! ❤️

Viral theft of light: A cyanophage protein dismantles cyanobacterial photosynthesis to accelerate infection Auxiliary metabolic genes, acquired by cyanobacterial viruses (cyanophages) from their hosts, are thought to manipulate host metabolism during infection. A recent study by Nadel et al. performed in vi...

Viral theft of light: A cyanophage protein dismantles cyanobacterial photosynthesis to accelerate infection www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Happy birthday to Judy and Dinh! Celebrating with Galette des rois and Kouign amann during lab meeting.

Joint A*STAR - King’s College London PhD Studentships in Biomedical Science 2026/27 King's College London is seeking outstanding and motivated students to join our university and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

A*STAR/KCL PhD scholarship available!

Dream of doing cutting-edge research, travelling between continents, and becoming obsessed with modelling infections in zebrafish?

My lab and @oehlerslab.org are looking for you!

Project details: 👉 shorturl.at/mkt1a
Catalogue page 6, project 2.1!

Happy pongal !

International society for antiviral research | International Society for Antiviral Research (ISAR) Do you want to shape the future of antiviral research and development? This is your opportunity to become a member of the International Society for Antiviral Research (ISAR) and vote for the next Pres...

www.linkedin.com/posts/isar-i...

Voting for the international society for antiviral research board members is open! Vote for me, if you want me aboard, or vote any of the great colleagues that have added their names. Join ISAR and attend the annual conference we hold around the world.

I’m happy and proud to be part of this scientist’s career. First as research assistant, seeing him through an engineer’s degree, and now passing his PhD qualifying exam!
Bravo Thomas!

Back for the Third Time: Organoid Day 2026! Organoid Day returns with expert talks and the latest research in 3D cell culture. Sign up now—spaces are limited!

www.stemcell.com/forms/organo...

One day meeting on organoids. Come see and share on who’s doing what with organoids in SG!

Frontiers | Antibacterial nanoagents: an emerging arsenal against bacterial persisters Bacterial persisters represent a metabolically dormant or slow-growing subpopulation within bacterial communities that exhibit resistance to antibiotics. The...

Check out this miniReview by Guisheng Zeng from @astar-idlabs.bsky.social and his colleagues in Nanjing, China on nanomaterial-based antimicrobials to reactivate dormant bacteria and eliminate persistent bugs.

www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic...

First lab meeting of 2026! And it was a great one, with beautiful results! These folks are brilliant! Bravo to Judy and Denzel for their beautiful work on alphavirus proteomics and flavivirus antivirals!

Welcome to our lab Dylan Kwan, a coop exchange student from
Simon Fraser University in Canada!

Intracellular interactions shape antiviral resistance outcomes in poliovirus via eco-evolutionary feedback - Nature Ecology & Evolution A model of intrahost poliovirus replication shows that, after several rounds of replication, pocapavir, a poliovirus capsid inhibitor, collapses viral density, preventing intracellular interactions th...

My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)

Congratulations to Wei Hao and our own postdoctoral Fish Hui Xian Poh for winning the best poster award at this year’s Singapore Scientific Conference!

Terribly behind the times with protein and gym bros. Not a big muscle country overall. They dress very well though! That’s something!

Weekend in Tokyo ahead of meeting up with colleagues.

Congratulations to our phd student Thomas for winning the best poster prize at the Pasteur Cambodia Immunology course!!

yes! remember though the evil of just one bubble in the gel...how many times I had to recast those things

Who remembers sequencing their molecular cloning experiments by hand and eye?!? Running your own acrylamide gels and reading the four bases from top to bottom of gel, to only get 200 nt read from a single mini prep hoping your insert was ok!?

Happening now! Prof Yue WANG, our pillar of Fungal biology at ASTAR ID Labs, is celebrating over 4 decades of research in his last seminar before retirement. What a great life story!

This was an excellent talk by a brilliant scientist, Kei Sato, from University of Tokyo, opening up a second satellite lab at Duke-NUS! Great news for Singapore virology!