Benjamin Werner

Is Oslo still standing?

If Trump gets the Peace Noble today, he should aim for Literature next.

He clearly has all the best words.

Somatic mutation and selection at population scale - Nature A new version of nanorate DNA sequencing, with an error rate lower than five errors per billion base pairs and compatible with whole-exome and targeted capture, enables epidemiological-scale studies of somatic mutation and selection and the generation of high-resolution selection maps across coding and non-coding sites for many genes.

Our latest work is out in Nature today. In this paper, we introduce an improved version of NanoSeq, a duplex sequencing protocol with <5 errors per billion bp in single DNA molecules, and use it to study the somatic mutation landscape of oral epithelium in >1000 people www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hope they switch off the water sprinklers by then

The October issue of Cancer Discovery @aacrjournals.bsky.social is now online! The cover features two papers on the role of #ecDNA heterogeneity in tumor evolution and adaptation to therapy - you can find these papers and much more here: aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

In the hope the academic system has and continues to improve since.

See also the spotlight article for a great summary

aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

Volume 15 Issue 10 | Cancer Discovery | American Association for Cancer Research

Very happy ecDNA has made the cover at @aacrjournals.bsky.social, highlighting two articles in the current issue, one on MYC(N) amplification in Neuroblastoma and one on the spatial heterogeneity of ecDNA amplified oncogenes in GBM.

aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

A photo of a Nobel medal

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance"

Stay tuned for more.
#NobelPrize

I am so out of fashion that I never heard about Bad Bunny before, but your argument seems sound.

Do you like theoretical biology, mathematical&conceptual modelling and want to apply yourself to cutting-edge research at all levels of biology, from molecules to ecosystems?

Come to EMBL! Scope includes physics-based models, emergence, statistics, ML/AI
embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

You can follow sections on BioRxiv you are interested in. Every week there is quite a lot of interesting work posted there.

Both in the near- and long-term:

"Medicine and science will, if funded, find answers for autism, heart disease, cancer, birth defects, mental illness, and diabetes. Presidents, lawyers, and bureaucratic toadies will not."

Excited to announce that registration for the 13th
@mathonco.bsky.social workshop on Treatment Revolution is now open. Held onsite @moffittnews.bsky.social Nov 2-Nov 7 #MoffittIMO more details: imo13.eventbrite.com. Deluxe travel awards are available on a competitive basis, apply by 10/03!

#MoffittIMO Workshop #MoffittIMO Workshop

If you are interested in learning more about what an IMO Workshop is like check out our dedicated website: imoworkshop.org. Note the workshop this year runs directly after our #MathOnco25 meeting: mathematical-oncology.org/mathonco25.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

But who reviews the reviewers?

or do not understand, or do not have moral or all.

Read Hannah Arendt.

It’s all there, it’s all known and yet we fall for the same cheap demagogy time and again.

What does this say about humankind?

Force always attracts man of low morality.

A.E.

The IG noble in physics goes to Italy to discover the physics of pasta sauce.

Amazing.

I am sure that was a main scientific priority of the government supported by billions of euros 😂

Can researchers stop AI making up citations? OpenAI’s GPT-5 hallucinates less than previous models do, but cutting hallucination completely might prove impossible.

“I think if it was possible, AI labs would have done it already.”

… Well …

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

And I am asking again. Where are the protests in the United States?

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

To cite the great Steven Weinberg:

"A society that only funds applied over basic research will end up with neither."

The problem lies in how one defines and determines low quality research.

Science funding is and in our current society always will be competitive, so society has to make decisions what to fund.

To only focus on short term applied research with seemingly immediate impact is stupid though.

Fluctuating DNA methylation tracks cancer evolution at clinical scale - Nature Cancer evolutionary dynamics are quantitatively inferred using a method, EVOFLUx, applied to fluctuating DNA methylation.

Studying cancer evolution needs multi-region or single cell seq for phylogenetics, right? Amazingly (I think!) we found single-sample bulk methylation suffices, via analysis of "fluctuating methylation". In @nature.com today led by brilliant @calumgabbutt.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Published today in @aacrjournals.bsky.social Imran Noorani & @magnushaughey.bsky.social share the first evidence that ecDNA can build up in the healthy brain before tumours form in #glioblastoma — pointing to new early intervention strategies.

👉 www.cancergrandchallenges.org/news/ecdna-u...

Finally and most importantly a huge shoutout to team eDyNAmiC, the @cancergrand.bsky.social, @cruk-cityoflondon.bsky.social that made this possible!

These are some of the highlights.

There is much more in the paper.

Still many open questions, some that we are currently tackling and some that we can hopefully address in the future.