Cade Mirchandani

Cade Mirchandani

@cademirch.bsky.social

bioinformatics phd candidate @ ucsc https://github.com/cademirch

48 Followers 95 Following 13 Posts Joined Jan 2025
2 weeks ago
The screenshot of the release notes reads:

A new version of TeX Live Utility is available!
TeX Live Utility 1.55 is now available-you have 1.54. Would you like to download it now?
Release Notes:
Changes Since 1.54
• Fix bug 137, homepage link in Help Book.
• First release in a long time, since I don't use TeX anymore and resent the very idea of paying Apple annually for the privilege of giving away free and open-source software. Also, I'm really lazy. Please accept my apologies for all the annoying issues you've encountered in this mission-critical software.
• Updated mirror list, which was three years out of date.
• Added missing legacy mirrors, which was even more out of date.
• Added an alert on startup when user tries Homebrew's lobotomized MacTex, because those lunatics left timgr but removed its database.
Thanks for nothing, guys. Bug 142 and 144.
• Use a custom user-agent to work around the Anubis bot trap on texlive.info. Can't wait to see what else breaks because of this, thanks to the profusion of degenerate Artificial Insemination fetishists scraping websites to feed their models.
• Lists of countries in Repository/Continent are now sorted. No idea how you people let me get away with that one for the last fifteen years.

There's a "is anyone even reading this" sort of honesty you get in the software update release notes from a project that's been around for a long time.

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2 weeks ago

Came across the phrase "cognitive DDOS" to describe our present culture.

Understood instantly what it meant.

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3 weeks ago
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COMBINE-lab - The skeptic’s guide to generative AI assisted coding An easy-to-use, flexible website template for labs, with automatic citations, GitHub tag imports, pre-built components, and more.

I’ve written a post about my recent experiences (successes) with AI coding models; the experiences that caused me to re-evaluate my initial judgements, the surprise I had at what can be accomplished, & some fears I have about these tools. Discussion welcome! combine-lab.github.io/blog/2026/02...

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1 month ago

Excited for this. Teaching popgen is one of my favourite parts of my job and I've wondered about doing an online version of the class for sometime. Teaming up with @jrossibarra.bsky.social to do this is wonderful.

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1 month ago
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Playing with sandbox.bio. This was remarkably cathartic.

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1 month ago

A succinct and useful list of rules for teaching data science, including some of my favourites: "teach with real data" and "have students do projects".

#databs #datasky

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1 month ago

Great! Looking forward to helping out with that!

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1 month ago

Nice! Now time for snakemake-rs? :)

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1 month ago

I've just released #rust-htslib 1.0. After a long time with a pretty stable API usage of rust-htslib in production, it feels like the right time to finally move to 1.0. Most important change is probably a switch to thread-safe pointers in BAM record handling. github.com/rust-bio/rus...

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1 month ago

Looking for something new to integrate into an #evolution or #microbiology course? Useful for lectures, labs, homework?

Have a look at our STEPS program, which simulates bacterial evolution, including the #LTEE. Easy web-based interface & lab manual w/ exercises to help develop students' intuition.

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1 month ago

vibe coding is the new doom scrolling?

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1 month ago
Fig. 2 | Inferred phylogeny, origin and evolution of Avena species.
a, Phylogenetic relationships and timescale of 44 subgenomes in 25 species
(40 subgenomes in 23 species are from Avena) inferred on the basis of 2,456 single-copy orthologous groups using RAxML taking T. aestivum and L. perenne as outgroup species. Orange, purple, green, red and blue backgrounds represent A, B, C and D lineages and outgroups, respectively. Bootstrap support values
are indicated with black, red and green dots. The scale bar represents branch lengths, which correspond to the mean number of substitutions per site in the alignments. The gray bar indicates the confidence interval of differentiation time for each node. Trees for each single-copy gene are depicted by gray lines. 21. Shi, T. et al. The super-pangenome of Populus unveils genomic facets for its adaptation and diversification in widespread forest trees. Mol. Plant 2024
88. Zhang, Y. et al. Telomere-to-telomere Citrullus super-pangenome provides direction for watermelon breeding. Nat. Genet. 56, 1750–1761 (2024).
89. Huang, Y. et al. Pangenome analysis provides insight into the evolution of the orange subfamily and a key gene for citric acid accumulation in citrus fruits. Nat. Genet. 55, 1964–1975 (2023).

Super-pangenome analyses across 35 accessions of 23 Avena species highlight their complex evolutionary history and extensive genomic diversity
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Common oat=Avena sativa

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1 month ago
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A fast introduction to snakemake (in 5 examples) - HackMD # A rapid introduction to snakemake (in 5 examples) See github repo: [ctb/2026-rapid-snakemake-intr

Once more unto the breach:

A fast introduction to snakemake, in 5 examples.

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2 months ago
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🚀 Our new paper on Alignoth just published in Bioinformatics!

Alignoth generates self-contained interactive HTML read alignment plots from BAM files – Rust-based, portable, and ideal for headless workflows.

📄 doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

#bioinformatics #genomics #rust @johanneskoester.bsky.social

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2 months ago

With population genetics on deck for #BI111 this week, preparations for HWE exercises for 1100+!students means lots of card-sorting!

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2 months ago
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I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...

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2 months ago

Cool! Curious to see what you do with this

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2 months ago
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🧬 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: “tskit arg visualizer: Interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs.” 

Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf302

Authors include: @kitchensjn.bsky.social, @yanwong.bsky.social

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2 months ago
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Special Issue: CONSERVATION GENOMICS ‐ MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Molecular Ecology: Vol 34, No 23 Molecular Ecology is an international journal for research using molecular genetic techniques to address questions in ecology, evolution, behavior and conservation.

New special issue in Molecular Ecology on Conservation Genomics #popGen #evolution 🧪🧬🖥️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1365294x...

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2 months ago
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Bamdam: a post-mapping authentication toolkit for ancient metagenomics - Genome Biology Ancient metagenomic studies using capture or shotgun sequencing often perform pairwise alignment of individual reads against large reference databases followed by lowest common ancestor assignment for...

Announcing bamdam: a new open source tool for studying ancient DNA 🧬 It shrinks massive metagenomic files by 10x and helps distinguish ancient sequences from contamination. Tested on the oldest DNA yet uncovered (2M years) link.springer.com/article/10.1... @bdesan.bsky.social @russcd.bsky.social

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2 months ago
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Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

What a beautiful paper! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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2 months ago
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Efficient Estimation of Nucleotide Diversity and Divergence Using Callable Loci (and More) Abstract. The increasing scale of population genomic datasets presents computational challenges in estimating summary statistics such as nucleotide diversi

@cademirch.bsky.social @erikenbody.bsky.social TB Sackton & @russcd.bsky.social introduce Callable Loci And More (clam), a tool that leverages callable loci to accurately estimate population genetic statistics (π, dxy, and FST).

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf282

#evobio #molbio #compbio

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3 months ago

The changed code is a small fraction of an open source contribution. Your commitment to understand the issue, how your proposed solution fits with the project, and be ready to own and push the review process forward is the biggest chunk of the work. Your effort is the contribution, not the code.

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3 months ago

What are you writing about?

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4 months ago

Friendly reminder that dishwashers made after 1995 or so are so water and energy efficient that even if you ran them twice fully loaded it would still use less water than handwashing the same load.

So many "green" things feel like sacrifices. Dishwashers are not one of them.

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4 months ago

Obsidian is great! I found this video helpful for getting started. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yA...

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4 months ago
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Snakemake Hackathon March 2026 We are excited to announce the Snakemake Hackathon 2026, to be held 9-13 March, 2026 at the Technical University Munich. This event will bring together passionate developers and data scientists to col...

Want to help shaping the future of #Snakemake? Then participate in the Snakemake hackathon 2026 in Munich! There's still room as the maximum number of participants is not yet reached. You can register here: indico.cern.ch/e/snakemake-...

#sciworkflows #reproducibility

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4 months ago
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Patterns of Genetic Diversity Within Three California Quail Species Are Best Explained by Climate and Landscape Changes Many North American game animals experienced severe population declines during the 19th century due to market hunting. However, estimates of the timing and magnitude of these declines often rely on a...

Check out the latest paper from the CCGP on California Quail and the ecological and anthropogenic factors that impact genomic variation. Led by Phred Benham and the Bowie group: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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4 months ago
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Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

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