Please share! My lab has an open fully-funded PhD position at Vilnius University's Life Sciences Center in Lithuania. The PhD project will involve identifying missing orthomyxovirus segments from public sequence data. Applicants must hold an MSc by June & have bioinformatics experience. 1/2

Why forest conservation is also public health In a lowland forest in southeastern Madagascar, what was missing proved as telling as what was found. Researchers trapping small mammals in the Manombo Special Reserve caught tuft-tailed rats in the i...

Why forest conservation is also public health by Rhett Ayers Butler news.mongabay.com/2026/04/why-... highlight of of the teams work lead by Elise Paietta (ASU) and Rachel Johnston (Zoo New England)

Dan Weinberger and I @yalesph.bsky.social are hiring multiple research positions in microbial/virus sequencing and bioinformatics workflows with respiratory pathogens, including Streptococcus pneumoniae, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, RSV, and/or hMPV.

See 👉 forms.gle/xpmzTtNqHFqK...

Want to annotate a bacterial genome with structures?

@oschwengers.bsky.social bakta and @gbouras13.bsky.social phold got together, and the result is Baktfold: protein annotation across the microbial tree of life using structures

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#phagesky #microsky #microbiomesky

🐧🌎🦉🧪💻 Tune in on Thursday, April 9th! Point Blue’s Chief Science Officer, Grant Ballard will be giving a virtual presentation on Adélie #Penguins: Their Past, Present and Future in a Changing #Antarctica. Learn more: shorturl.at/q7YkT

A diagram of the life cycle of the seal heart worm. The first few stages of the worm develop in the louse, and then the nematodes move to seals and develop into larger adults. Seal lice are delightfully round, but less delightfully apparently transmit heart worms.

Thing I learned today: Seal Lice vector seal heart worms! I don't know of another louse species that vectors a nematode. Do any other entofriends? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AMP thought of as one-off in Drosophila may have moved around a lot…much like genes encoding antiparasitoid proteins fand pore-forming toxins in insects (see karger.com/jin/article/...). Extremely cool. A challenge is that short peptides present a very hard problem—discerning convergence from HGT…

Deltaviruses don’t just borrow a helper virus, they can travel inside it to infect news. A literal Trojan Horse “virus-in-a-virus”🤯@viroscope.bsky.social @karimaj.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @cellcellpress.bsky.social

Deep untargeted wastewater metagenomic sequencing from sewersheds across the United States Wastewater monitoring enables non-invasive, population-scale tracking of community infections independent of healthcare-seeking behavior and clinical diagnosis. Metagenomic sequencing extends this cap...

Happy to report that we submitted a new manuscript this week.

The manuscript is abour our work untargeting wastewater sequencing as a technique for monitoring viral pathogens from wastewater. @lennijusten.bsky.social
1/
medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

These wee birds are just zen

Congratulations to Sonomi Yamaguchi for her paper at @nature.com. Sonomi discovered Clover defense and explained how nucleotide signals control each step of viral sensing, immune regulation, and viral restriction – named for her beautiful "four-leaf" structures 🍀

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Three postdoctoral fellowships in quantitative biology are available as part of a new Quantitative Biology Initiative in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland.

Best consideration date: 3/14

Job Ad:
umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j...

Department:
biology.umd.edu/people

Image of a herpesvirus structure

I am excited to share our latest preprint - An evolutionarily divergent herpesvirus with a giant tail. Featuring symmetry breaking and genome annotation from structure using ModelAngelo. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Polyomaviruses are masters of persistence and dissemination: we show there are two forms of long-term persistent PyVs in the kidney: the majority being cryptic (non-shedding) and a minority that actively shed, and these fates are determined shortly after infection.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Multiple protein structure alignment at scale with FoldMason Protein structure is conserved beyond sequence, making multiple structural alignment (MSTA) essential for analyzing distantly related proteins. Computational prediction methods have vastly extended ou...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Transcriptome mining reveals diversity and evolution of circulating and endogenous amphibian retroviruses - Retrovirology Background The evolutionary history of retroviruses and their impact on vertebrate evolution remains poorly understood, particularly in non-mammalian hosts. In this study, we explore retroviruses associated with Amphibia through analysis of 169 RNA sequencing datasets from 102 amphibian species. Using a BLAST-based approach, we identified retroviral transcripts from assembled transcriptomes and phylogenetically characterise both their pol and env regions to elucidate their evolutionary history. Results We identified the transcription of 18 novel and two previously described retroviruses with closest relatives in gammaretrovirus, epsilonretrovirus, betaretrovirus and spumaretrovirinae. Despite their differing pol phylogenies, we found that all amphibian retroviruses belong to the gamma-type envelope group (GTE). This suggests a common selection pressure for amphibian retroviruses to retain GTEs. Within these GTEs we also observed a new clade of alpharetrovirus-like envelopes in amphibians which form a sister clade to avian alpharetrovirus envelopes. Furthermore, we observe correlations between amphibian taxonomical order and retroviral diversity, with Gymnophiona (caecilians) harbouring the widest diversity of retroviruses whilst Anura (frogs and toads) harbour the fewest. Through mapping these transcribed retroviruses to their respective genomes (seven available) supplemented with observing ORF intactness, we determined that 14 of the 20 retroviruses are likely endogenous in origin yet are still transcribed in many amphibian tissues. These amphibian endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) have high genomic copy numbers: most (5/7) ERVs investigated have > 100 copies, and one of which has 9,219 integrations within the Ichthyophis bannanicus caecilian genome. This high retroviral load in amphibian genomes may suggest that these retroviruses have low pathogenicity, or may reflect a lack of transposon control mechanisms in amphibian cells. Conclusions Through the characterisation of metatranscriptomic and genomic data from retroviruses in this study, we provide insights into their evolution in amphibians and exemplify the diversity of Retroviridae in vertebrate genomes. The identification of novel retroviral clades, widespread transcription of endogenous retroviruses in amphibians and abundance of ERV copies suggests that Retroviridae have played a significant role in amphibian evolution.

New study uncovers extensive diversity of circulating and endogenous #amphibian #retroviruses, identifying 20 retrovirus transcripts across 102 species, revealing deep evolutionary patterns in vertebrate hosts.🦎🧬#VirusEvolution
📄 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12977-025-00669-y
👤 EVBC member: Emma Harding

Registration form for iVoM4 After submitting this form, you will receive the instructions to join our webinars at the email address you provide.

New 2026 iVoM series coming up!

Each session includes SCR and 3 ECRs, & plenty of opportunities to interact with the speakers and ask questions.

Sign up for links/updates: docs.google.com/forms/d/1hAB...

First up: Viral Biotechnologies Wed, 28 th January at 17:00 CET / 11:00 EST / 08:00 PST

Stacks of book When Trees Testify by Beronda Montgomery

Grateful to @beaverdalebooks.bsky.social & Des Moines Botanical Garden for an amazing launch event for When Trees Testify: Science Wisdom History and America's Black Botanical Legacy. Amazing group of friends, colleagues, and new acquaintances celebrating this week's launch
#WhenTreesTestify

Ok. Maybe adenos next.

Not really - minimal effort on that if any. All effort on the same gig as usual, penguin ecology project.

She is 20-25 min helicopter ride away from Cape Royds.

Genetic diversity in horseshoe bat ACE2 and sarbecovirus spike proteins mutually shape one another Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) serves as the entry receptor for a wide diversity of sarbecoviruses naturally harboured by horseshoe bats (genus Rhinolophus ). Despite the extensive circulation...

New preprint led by our MSc student Wenye Li!! 🎉

@systemsvirology.bsky.social

What we find is a historic genetic interplay between sarbecoviruses and their horseshoe bat hosts' ACE2 receptor! 🦇 🧵...

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

A screenshot of the front page of Pathoplexus' website, showing the addition of a tile for Marburg Virus.

1/ 🚀 Pathoplexus now supports Marburg virus (MARV) and Ravn virus (RAVN) (sister viruses in the same genus). MARV has two main clades and causes severe disease with reported fatality rates of 24–88%.

You can read more detail about adding Marburg here: pathoplexus.org/news/2025-11...

Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses - Nature Communications Borgs are large extrachromosomal elements of anaerobic methane-oxidizing archaea. Here, via in silico protein structure prediction of ~10,000 Borg proteins, the authors reveal that Borgs share numerou...

Out now in Nature Communications: Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@luisvalentin.bsky.social @lingdong-shi.bsky.social @martianmicrobe.bsky.social @mschoelmerich.bsky.social

Widespread and intron-rich mirusviruses are predicted to reproduce in nuclei of unicellular eukaryotes - Nature Microbiology Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.

Check out our latest paper on mirusviruses, one of the most remarkable new groups of protist viruses - extremely diverse, carry lots of spliceosomal introns (including new homing introns) and are at the evolutionary crossroads between tailed phages and herpesviruses! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢 New preprint is out on bioRxiv 📢:

How much does virome prep influence our view of the human gut virome?

Short answer: a lot.

Long answer:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Different methods lead to distinct community structures, richness, and major virus-host abundance patterns.

🧵 1/5

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals Host body temperature can define a virus’s replicative profile—influenza A viruses (IAVs) adapted to 40° to 42°C in birds are less temperature sensitive in vitro compared with human isolates adapted t...

How does fever work?

Our new Science paper shows how elevated body temperature can protect against severe influenza and that avian-origin viruses escape this defence.

This is likely one reason why bird flus and some pandemic influenzas can be so severe.🧵

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life | Quanta Magazine The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.

According to the microbial ecologist Puri López-García, pictured here at a salt flat in the Chilean Andes, some 25% to 50% of all bacterial cells may be parasites of other cells.