Guillaume Méric

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Introduction to building (better) R packages - Nicola Rennie Abstract: There are many benefits to turning your R scripts or functions into a package, like making your code easier to re-use, easier… Introduction to building (better) R packages

Introduction to building (better) R packages www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Kr... (R/Pharma 2025 #Rstats)

Noteworthy from the blue skies — mid-Feb 2026 Two in a row! It’s been a while. I hope this list of interesting recent papers (at least to me!) in the field of microbiome science, microbial ecology and other stuff will be useful to you! A…

Two in a row! Amazing. Here's the list of noteworthy studies I recently stumbled upon (and mostly shared here on bluesky), in the fields of microbiome science, microbial ecology and other stuff. Hope this will be useful to some!
mericlab.com/2026/02/14/n...

Portrait of Tove Fall, SciLifeLab Group Leader and Uppsala University Professor, with greenery all around.

🧪 In two new studies on 28,000 individuals, researchers are able to show how 11 genetic variants affect gut microbiome.

@tovefall.bsky.social (SciLifeLab/@uu.se) led one of the studies.

Learn more in the Uppsala University press release here:
www.mynewsdesk.com/uu/pressrele...

The HUNT study identifies host genetic factors reproducibly associated with human gut microbiota composition - Nature Genetics Genome-wide analyses in the Norwegian HUNT study with replication in Swedish and Finnish cohorts identify host genetic variants associated with gut microbiome features and provide evidence of a causal...

Published back to back in the same issue of Nat Genetics with similar work done with the HUNT population cohort from Norway: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Genome-wide association analyses highlight the role of the intestinal molecular environment in human gut microbiota variation - Nature Genetics Population-based studies from Sweden with replication in Norway identify associations between host genetic variants and gut microbial composition and implicate short-chain fatty acid chemosensors as m...

Delighted to have contributed to this impressive work led by @tovefall.bsky.social & many others👏 (w/ @gazollavolpiano.bsky.social from our side). This novel microbiome GWAS (n=~16k+12k valid) expands knowledge on genetic factors associated w/ gut microbiota variation.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Temporal dynamics and microbial interactions shaping the gut resistome in early infancy - Nature Communications Here the authors show that antibiotic resistance genes peak in the gut at the age of 6 months, and that beneficial bifidobacteria produce aromatic lactic acids that actively inhibit antimicrobial resi...

👶 Curious about infant gut microbiota and 🧬 antimicrobial resistance? Have a look at our recent publication @natcomms.nature.com
#microbiome #infantgut #AMR
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New work associates Parabacteroides abundance with gut-barrier markers and inflammation in older adults (n=55 >60yo), suggesting a potentially protective host-glycan niche (mucin/sialic acid/Neu5Ac).
🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our EMBO workshop is now live. Visit us in Bath this summer for a two week workshop designed to help you study host-microbe interactions in the zebrafish, and develop the bioinformatics skills needed to analyse the complex data sets that arise from microbiomic studies.

Addressing pandemic-wide systematic errors in the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny - Nature Methods This Resource paper presents a global SARS-CoV-2 phylogenetic tree of 4,471,579 high-quality genomes consistently constructed by Viridian, an efficient amplicon-aware assembler.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our paper, led by @martibartfast.bsky.social
a) correcting errors in 4.5 million genomes & their phylogeny
b) improving representation of the Global South in public data
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
(thread 1/n)

Little Changes an introduction to evolution Click on the image below, to read the story. Meet the Rinkidinks. They live together in one large happy family, carefree and untroubled by the rest of the world. Until …

Happy #DarwinDay 🧬🌿! To celebrate, why not share a story about #evolution with a #FutureScientist? My book, Little Changes, is a fun bedtime story for young readers to explore how small changes shape the living world.
littlestories.co.uk/little-chang...
#ScienceForKids #STEMBooks

Gotta love Nature's opinion pieces

"Science funding needs fixing - but not like that"

"Academic publishing is broken - but publishing less is not the solution"

"AI will kill science - how can researchers use it to be more efficient?"

A unified catalog of 204,938 reference genomes from the human gut microbiome - Nature Biotechnology More than 200,000 gut prokaryotic reference genomes and the proteins they encode are collated, providing comprehensive resources for microbiome researchers.

For example, this 2020 paper estimated that more than 4600 species of bacteria reside in human guts. Yet about 3000 of these we haven't grown in a lab or even named. We know them only from spotting their genomes in metagenomic studies of all the residents of the gut.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A great initiative supporting women in microbiology! #microsky

Check out this new & very promising method for differential analysis in microbiomes from @antagomir.bsky.social et al.

Applications are now open for our EMBO Practical Course in Computational and Experimental Microbiomics! 🧫🔬🖥️

meetings.embo.org/event/26-mic...

Come learn a mix of computational and experimental microbiome techniques from 6-8th July in beautiful Bath, UK!

Registration Deadline: 11 May 2026

Gut E. coli (esp. pks+/colibactin+) have been thought to be a link between CRC & liver metastasis, possibly by translocating via the portal vein. This work explores in-depth causal mol. mechanisms of liver metastasis promotion by E. coli strains enriched in CRC cases
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study - Nature Medicine In a randomized controlled study involving 1,298 participants from a general sample, performance of humans when assisted by a large language model (LLM) was sensibly inferior to that of the LLM alone ...

Randomized study (n=1,298) tested LLMs as medical assistants -> users didn’t make better care-seeking decisions and got worse at naming likely conditions vs. control group that could use any resources. Bottleneck was not medical knowledge but the interaction itself
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Meta-analysis of the uncultured gut microbiome across 11,115 global metagenomes reveals a candidate signature of health The human gut microbiome is important for host health, yet over 60% of gut species remain uncultured and inaccessible to experimental manipulation. He…

Great work again from @alexmsalmeida.bsky.social et al highlights uncultured genus CAG-170 (Oscillospiraceae) to be central node in healthy co-abundance networks in >11k gut metagenomes, with predicted B12 biosynthesis/cross-feeding functions possibly involved.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Any UK plan for partial Horizon association ‘a profound error’ - Research Professional News Academic leaders warn against UK abandoning participation in collaborative part of EU R&I programme

UKRI's chief executive said recently that the UK "may wish to explore" paring back its association to the EU's research programme, to make it partial.

That would be a "profound strategic error", critics now warn.

By @clanicholson.bsky.social

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-euro...

🚨 Calling all ECR's #MicrobialGenomics & #Microbiome symposium in Nottingham (5th June)- present/chair/posters

Abstract submission is 5 pm TODAY!!!

Keynotes @halllab.bsky.social & @alexmsalmeida.bsky.social
#MNGPopUp #MicroSky

please share

Excited to announce that I am organizing a symposium on "Microbiomes in Conservation" at #ISME20 in Auckland, New Zealand together with Madeleine van Oppen.

Consider submitting an abstract; it will be a fab conference! Deadline Feb 15!

isme-microbes.org/isme20-sessi...

@isme-microbes.bsky.social

New study combines MPRAs+RNAseq to functionally validate 94 rare nc variants from blood trait GWAS -> identification of 22 w/ direct regulatory effects. Great example of what can be done from association work to functional validation!
🔗 www.cell.com/cell-reports...
(ft @mikeinouye.bsky.social et al)

Genetic dissection of stool frequency implicates vitamin B1 metabolism and other actionable pathways in the modulation of gut motility Background Genetic studies of stool frequency (SF), an indirect proxy for gastrointestinal transit, may reveal therapeutically tractable pathways relevant to IBS and other dysmotility disorders. Obje...

New GWAS on stool frequency (n=268K) highlights vitamin B1 (thiamine) metabolism as a new modulator of gut motility via SLC35F3/XPR1. In ~98K UKB participants, dietary thiamine intake correlates with stool frequency too w/ these loci + MR predicts causal effects with IBS.
gut.bmj.com/content/earl...

I am grateful to be in the training team along with the excellent organisers & trainers @tweethinking.bsky.social @edanfoley.bsky.social @coreyholt.bsky.social Bethan Littleford-Colqhoun, Jiawei Wang @taylorlabgroup.bsky.social and many more. Also a great speaker list (see website). See you in July!

The 2026 EMBO course in Computational and Experimental Microbiomics held in @uniofbath.bsky.social has been announced! Come and join us for this course to study host-microbe interactions and co-evolution.
⏰ When: 6-18 July 26
🚨 Registration: 11 May 26
🔗 meetings.embo.org/event/26-mic...

Fecal microbiota transplantation plus immunotherapy in metastatic renal cell carcinoma: the phase 1 PERFORM trial - Nature Medicine In a phase 1 trial testing healthy donor fecal microbial transplantation with immune checkpoint blockade in patients with previously untreated renal cell carcinoma, treatment was safe with an encourag...

PERFORM trial 🇨🇦 on renal cell carcinoma: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
TACITO trial 🇮🇹 on renal cell carcinoma: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
FMT-LUMINate trial 🇨🇦 on non-small cell lung cancer and melanoma: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

3 recent trials in Nature Medicine test FMT as an ICI add-on (renal+lung cancers). Early efficacy signals + mechanistic hints that taxa/function shifts may matter more than donor similarity + toxicity effects mixed.
Promising, but prob need larger trials and more standardisation. Links to studies 👇

Inequalities in cancer mortality between people with and without disability: A nationwide data linkage study of 10 million adults in Australia Yi Yang and colleagues estimate overall and type-specific cancer mortality inequalities between adults with and without disability in Australia, reporting both relative and absolute inequalities to in...

New Australian health data linkage study on n=10.4M with 9y follow-up showing that people with disability have 2x cancer death rates vs those without. Suggested solution: more accessible cancer screening + prevention programs tailored for disabled people.
journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

Assessment of genome evolution in Bifidobacterium adolescentis indicates genetic adaptation to the human gut | mSystems To comprehensively explore the biodiversity within a microbial species, the reconstruction of a substantial number of genomes is essential. In this study, we successfully uncovered the genetic diversi...

Comparative genomics of Bifidobacterium adolescentis (n=1.6k genomes, mostly MAGs from 44 countries) for adult-gut adaptation signatures: 203 soft-core host-interaction genes (incl adhesion/pili) +7 clades w/ some geographic structure + co-occur w/ butyrate producers
journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....