Tal Korem

Tal Korem

@tkorem.bsky.social

Microbiome, metagenomics, ML, and reproductive health. All views are mine. So are all your base

523 Followers 429 Following 79 Posts Joined Aug 2023
1 month ago

The truly visionary thing for Simons to do would be to map the collaboration graph of submitted proposals, find the bridges between large connected components, and offer them unrestricted awards

22 2 0 2
2 months ago
Schopenhauer
221 29 5 1
2 months ago

Pollution dropping by that much likely means a whole bunch of people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be. Incredible stuff.

105 20 1 0
2 months ago
Post image

We just published in @molsystbiol.org with the Mugler lab (UPitt) on bacterial population dynamics during tumor colonization (mouse model). Our study was guided by a Luria–Delbrück-style idea: infer mechanism from statistics (1/7) 🧪🦠
doi.org/10.1038/s443...

18 12 2 0
3 months ago

Out after peer-review: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Our bottom line stayed: never use leave-one-out cross-validation as it has inherent train-test leakage. Consider our Rebalanced version instead!

We now also account for regression and nested cross-validation, with more extensive benchmarking.

39 12 0 1
3 months ago

Using leave-one-out cross-validation to calculate metrics such as AUC and R^2 creates bias! This can be fixed by removing one of each class in the meanwhile to maintain the training data distribution - great work by Tal and his team 🧪🧬🖥️

11 3 0 0
5 months ago
Post image

I found a flowchart which helps you navigate the IT landscape

10,560 3,744 53 65
3 months ago

Back when we hid beer in the cold room in a box labeled “yeast embryos.”

14 2 1 0
3 months ago

Out after peer-review: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Our bottom line stayed: never use leave-one-out cross-validation as it has inherent train-test leakage. Consider our Rebalanced version instead!

We now also account for regression and nested cross-validation, with more extensive benchmarking.

39 12 0 1
4 months ago

As long as three reviewers keep reading each proposal, doesn't really address anything either

1 0 0 0
4 months ago

"This could take down Democrats, too."

I know. And I frankly wouldn't give even an itty bitty damn if it implicated every Democratic man in Congress, every Democratic hopeful for 2028 and every Democrat who has even thought about running for office.

Down with the sex predators, wherever they are.

8,675 1,789 215 289
4 months ago

White paper: github.com/aqlaboratory...
GitHub Repo: github.com/aqlaboratory...
Huggingface: huggingface.co/OpenFold/Ope...
Testimonials: openfold.ghost.io/openfold3-co...

9 2 1 0
4 months ago

OpenFold3-preview (OF3p) is out: a sneak peek of our AF3-based structure prediction model. Our aim for OF3 is full AF3-parity for every modality. We now believe we have a clear path towards this goal and are releasing OF3p to enable building in the OF3 ecosystem. More👇

126 42 1 3
4 months ago

Just to be super clear, if you’re phoning in your peer review to ai you should quit your job so someone else who actually likes science can have it.

370 67 6 2
5 months ago

No idea. Still working through this.

1 0 0 0
5 months ago

This is from the very paper you linked to - Figure S5. They claim that this has a p-value of 1. It's not here and there, this is what most results look like, and this is a large part of the basis for claiming that there are no robust associations with other tumors.

0 0 1 0
5 months ago
Post image

So you look at this figure and your interpretation is "no signal"?

1 0 1 0
6 months ago

I never knew I needed this thread

1 0 0 0
7 months ago
Preview
Korem Lab - Microbiome Systems Biology @ Columbia | New York, USA We apply systems biology approaches to decipher the metabolic interactions between the microbiome and its human host in diverse clinical settings, aiming towards personalized microbiome-based therapeu...

We are hiring a postdoc - come work with us (www.koremlab.science) at the intersection of #microbiome, data science, and women's health!
Message or email me if interested. 🖥️ 🧬

16 10 0 1
7 months ago
Garud Lab

I am seeking a postdoc for my group at UCLA. We work at the intersection of population genetics x microbiome (garud.eeb.ucla.edu). If interested, please message me!

84 99 1 4
7 months ago

This will also likely reduce the number of study sections, firing SROs and making them less specialized.

0 0 1 0
8 months ago
Preview
Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies Nature Microbiology - In this Consensus Statement, the authors outline strategies for processing, analysing and interpreting low-biomass microbiome samples, and provide recommendations to minimize...

Hope this is useful - consensus statement "Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies" rdcu.be/er3Io

106 48 2 2
9 months ago
The trolley problem graphic where one side is several people tied to the train tracks except the other side has no one on the tracks. A man is standing holding a lever trying to decide which track the trolley should take. The text reads “You can pull the lever, but to do so you must wear a mask at the grocery store.”
1,484 433 7 13
9 months ago
Post image

Not getting much attention, except in a recent NYTimes story, is a provision to increase the tax on university endowments and those of other nonprofits.

735 372 27 33
9 months ago
Preview
Incorporating scale uncertainty in microbiome and gene expression analysis as an extension of normalization - Genome Biology Statistical normalizations are used in differential analyses to address sample-to-sample variation in sequencing depth. Yet normalizations make strong, implicit assumptions about the scale of biologic...

New paper in Genome Biology!

genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

We introduce scale models, a generalization of normalizations that explciitly account for uncertainty in biological system scale (e.g., microbial load).

8 3 2 0
9 months ago

as a resident of syracuse, ny, a rust belt town that used to be an economic epicenter for the nation: syracuse university is our largest local employer now and if it goes under, so does my town, which has the largest concentration of child poverty in the nation.

417 97 4 0
9 months ago
Preview
Antibiotic research at Harvard lab threatened by federal funding cuts Microbiologist Michael Baym studies antibiotic resistance at Harvard Medical School. He lost millions in federal funding this week.

"I'm still in shock. I know that there have been political issues around Harvard in recent weeks, but antibiotic resistance isn't one of them." My conversation with Harvard microbiologist @baym.lol, one of many researchers there who just lost millions in fed. grants. www.wbur.org/news/2025/05...

428 243 11 19
10 months ago

Our paper explaining why Gihawi et al. failed to prove an error in the normalization used by the 2020 cancer #microbiome analysis now out as a Matters Arising in @asm.org #mSystems (w/ @george-austin.bsky.social) 🖥️ 🧬

Thread explaining the key points below.

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

8 3 0 0
10 months ago

Our paper explaining why Gihawi et al. failed to prove an error in the normalization used by the 2020 cancer #microbiome analysis now out as a Matters Arising in @asm.org #mSystems (w/ @george-austin.bsky.social) 🖥️ 🧬

Thread explaining the key points below.

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

8 3 0 0
11 months ago

Come and work with me!

The Nature Micro team is expanding and we're looking for someone to champion microbial ecology, plant micro & related areas for the journal

Knowledge of microbial ecology/plant micro is desirable but we're open to applications from all microbiologists

Link below 👇

100 99 1 1