Wei Shen 沈 伟

Most exciting study have seen for ages, and Fernando the most excited speaker. Much anticipated. Highly recommended, a lot of food for thought (and quite a dense paper - lots to think about)

MVIF 44

It's Monday!
...and a new #MVIF program is out! 🤩

Free registration: cassyni.com/s/mvif-44

⭐️ Highlights:
🇺🇸 Vanessa Hale
🇰🇷 Jun Hyung Cha

⭐️ Keynote:
🇺🇸 Katherine Lemon @kathlemon.bsky.social

⭐️ Talks:
🇺🇸 Meenakshi Chakraborty
🇨🇳 Wei Shen @shenwei356.bsky.social
🇺🇸 Johanna Gutleben

📣 New preprint from us at phagefoundry.org 📣
A solid machine learning framework & to predict strain-level phage-host interactions across diverse bacterial genera from genome sequences alone. Avery Noonan from the Arkin Lab led this massive effort
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Honoured and quite blown-over to receive this award. I have been, and continue to be, very lucky - first with great mentors, and then really prodigious students, postdocs and collaborators. Working with them has been a joy.

Genome size estimation from long read overlaps AbstractMotivation. Accurate genome size estimation is an important component of genomic analyses such as assembly and coverage calculation, though existin

Our method for genome size estimation from long-read overlaps is now published 🥳
academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Thread on #GI2025 's second day! 👇🏻

Ben Langmead @benlangmead.bsky.social delivers the official opening for this year's Genome Informatics Conference #GI2025 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
List of talks and posters: meetings.cshl.edu/abstracts.as...

Cool paper new paper from Lorién López-Villellas, @santiagomarco.bsky.social and others!

Super cute and simple idea:
In Gotoh's affine-cost alignment, only the M matrix is needed during tracing: we can just search for a gap-length x such that M[i][j] = M[i-x][j]+o+x*e or M[i][j] = M[i][j-x]+o+x*e.

I also have serious concerns about the consolidation of roles (one person is now publisher, chief editor, and also a frequent author) as exemplified in a recent paper that was fast-tracked for publication.

Really exciting that the preprint on Barbell, a new demultiplexer, is finally out!
It's the first tool that builds on Sassy, the approximate-DNA-searching tool that @rickbitloo.bsky.social and myself developed earlier this year, specifically with this application in mind.

Around 10% of your Nanopore reads (SQK-RBK114) are incorrectly trimmed. Here is why, and how our new tool Barbell solves it:

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

Want to get started? github.com/rickbeeloo/b...

GitHub - mohsenzakeri/Movi: Fast, Cache-Efficient, and Scalable Queries on Pangenomes Fast, Cache-Efficient, and Scalable Queries on Pangenomes - mohsenzakeri/Movi

1/6 Movi 2 is here: faster and more space-efficient for pangenome queries. Its fastest mode uses half the memory of Movi 1 while running ~30% faster. github.com/mohsenzakeri...

YouTube video by Milner Centre for Evolution How the Vectors of Antibiotic Resistance Have Evolved - Professor Zamin Iqbal

Podcast with me and @turiking.bsky.social for the @milnerevolution.bsky.social series, on plasmid evolution over the last 100 years, talking about our ( @cazares-adr.bsky.social , Nick Thomson, @sarah1alexander.bsky.social & co) recent paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
youtu.be/Mzr3TD4ijs0?...

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler!

Nanopore's getting accurate, but

1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies?
2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them?

with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social

1 / N

Alice: fast and haplotype-aware assembly of high-fidelity reads based on MSR sketching We introduce Mapping-friendly Sequence Reduction (MSR) sketches, a sketching method for high-fidelity (HiFi) long reads, and Alice, an assembler that operates directly on these sketches. MSR produces ...

Our preprint on our new metagenomic HiFi assembler Alice is out 🥳 Based on a *new sketching method* (🧵1/6)
👉 Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
👉 Github github.com/rolandfaure/...

Illustration of Burrows-Wheeler Transform and many auxiliary structures from the input string how$now$brown$cow$#

New tool "bwt-svg" for making illustrations of the BWT and the many auxiliary arrays and other structures related to it. Pyodide-based no-installation-necessary interface here: benlangmead.github.io/bwt-svg/. (H/t to @robert.bio for pointing me to pyodide!) Full repo: github.com/benlangmead/....

Efficient and accurate search in petabase-scale sequence repositories - Nature MetaGraph enables scalable indexing of large sets of DNA, RNA or protein sequences using annotated de Bruijn graphs.

After years of research and continuous refinement, we’re thrilled to share that our paper on the MetaGraph framework — enabling Petabase-scale search across sequencing data — has been published today in Nature (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

Efficient and accurate search in petabase-scale sequence repositories www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬🖥️🧪
MetaGraph: metagraph.ethz.ch
Code: github.com/ratschlab/me...

Just published an interactive article about a magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which powers sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa: sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt

It's also notoriously unintuitive so I'm hoping this article helps you build that intuition.

How to rapidly search the world’s microbial DNA By making the world’s microbial DNA easier to explore, LexicMap helps researchers track outbreaks, study antibiotic resistance, and understand microbial diversity.

There are millions of openly available microbial genomes, but searching them can be slow.

Until now 🥁

Introducing LexicMap, a new alignment tool that lets scientists search these data in minutes, helping track antibiotic resistance, trace outbreaks, and more.

www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/r...
🦠

Thank you folks for your feedback on our survey about Hash functions in genomic sequence analysis. We've updated the paper and you can see the new version here: tinyurl.com/4kk9ccmt.

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols.
Thread 1/n

I think it's because there are only a few bioinformatics packages to use. Most people don't want to reinvent wheels like me 😅

Glad you like them!

Efficient sequence alignment against millions of prokaryotic genomes with LexicMap - Nature Biotechnology LexicMap uses a fixed set of probes to efficiently query gene sequences for fast and low-memory alignment.

Efficient sequence alignment against millions of prokaryotic genomes with LexicMap - @shenwei356.bsky.social @zaminiqbal.bsky.social go.nature.com/3K09TgJ

Release LexicMap v0.8.0 · shenwei356/LexicMap v0.8.0 - 2025-09-10 No changes to the index format (see Index format changelog). New commands: lexicmap utils merge-search-results: Merge a query's search results from multiple indexes. lexicmap ...

BTW, we've just released v0.8.0, with reduced indexing and searching memory usage, more features (e.g., limiting search by TaxId), and more utilities to improve the usability.
github.com/shenwei356/L...

Thanks!

I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to visit @ebi.embl.org (thanks to the @embl.org Sabbatical fellowship). The guidance and support I received from Zam (@zaminiqbal.bsky.social), John (@bacpop.org) and other colleagues have been immensely valuable! You changed my career！❤️

Hashed sorting is typically faster than hash tables Benchmarks and theoretical explanation of why and when hashed radix sort beats hash tables.

Hashing vs. sorting; interesting! reiner.org/hashed-sorting. Also I wonder if, depending on your use case, semi-sorting provides an even greater benefit? 🧬🖥️

Amazing Jim!