🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social

We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked

What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective

We call it the digital sphinx

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

The conference is quickly filling up! Don't wait to sign up. We also received some funding and can offer fellowships to graduate students and postdocs. Won't cover the whole cost but will certainly make it much easier!

Aging clocks delineate neuron types vulnerable or resilient to neurodegeneration and identify neuroprotective interventions - Nature Aging Gallrein et al. pair functional assays with clocks to compare chronological versus biological age of single neuron types in C. elegans, to probe their vulnerability or resilience to neurodegeneration,...

🧠⏰our latest paper is out now: how each neuron ages differently allowed us to define in silico screens for new therapeutic molecules that could prevent neurodegeneration @cecad.bsky.social @unicologne.bsky.social @uniklinikkoeln.bsky.social @meyerdh.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s43...

🔬 Discover the latest advances from Labex IBEID

We have released a new white paper highlighting recent scientific and technological advances from the partners.

➡️ Key results
➡️ Latest innovations
➡️ Future challenges for Emerging Infectious Diseases research

www.labexibeid.fr/en/ibeid-whi...

Not all bacteria are beneficial in every context.

We found that enriching Drosophila with a commensal bacterium reduces tolerance to viral infection. The effect was virus-specific and occurred without changes in viral load, immune gene expression or intestinal damage.

rdcu.be/eZ4Sd

We just uploaded our most recent paper to @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social and submitted the manuscript for publication. We are really excited with this collaboration between our lab (ColladoLab) @cimususc.bsky.social and the lab of @hanli-pasteur.bsky.social @pasteur.fr

Kicking off 2026 the best way we know how: together! 🥐👑

Our annual Galette des Rois brought the team together, and Mori Yoshida claimed the crown for the 4th year running! 🎉

But the real treasure? These moments that unite us before another year of discovery.

Here's to an incredible 2026! 🔬✨

Verena Verena is an NSF-funded Institute working towards using open data, biological research, and artificial intelligence to predict and prevent the next pandemic.

If you want to help, you can share our story, check out our work at viralemergence.org, and - if you're the one in a million person who can save our project - reach out. (At this point, my job is to fundraise for the amazing scientists I work with, so they can focus on doing some actual science! 🦠)

Now published as version of record at @elife.bsky.social !

Layers of Immunity: Deconstructing the Drosophila effector response. The tools are now deposited in the VDRC (link ⬇️)

elifesciences.org/articles/107...
shop.vbc.ac.at/vdrc_store/d...

#Drosophila #IDsky #SymbioSky #Infection #Immunology

Caenorhabditis elegans, imaged with confocal laser scanning microscopy, and modeled by surface rendering software. Stock image.

All hail Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most researched organisms on Earth. Collaborative data sharing in the nematode research community led to four Nobel Prize-winning discoveries about human development and disease. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/uNqU50Xyj4e

Version 2 is out! More comprehensive text plus new tissue- and pathway-specific analysis revealing how different viruses trigger systemic aging through diverse mechanisms.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In flies and worms, more pathogenic viruses caused greater aging acceleration, and the effect lingered even after clearance, new study reveals.
#Aging #Infection #MicroSky #Virology
📖 shorturl.at/OeYVp
✍️ @rubengonzalez.bsky.social @castellosanjuan.bsky.social
@salehlabparis.bsky.social @pasteur.fr

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on.

(Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

IT'S HAPPENING! 💥 I'm psyched to launch the collaboration between @qedscience.bsky.social & @openrxiv.bsky.social @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! Preprint + q.e.d = your science is out there, and anyone can appreciate it. Let's care about making discoveries, and not on “getting published” (1/3) 👇

Taxonomic expansion and reorganization of Flaviviridae - Nature Microbiology Analysis of RNA polymerase hallmark gene phylogenies supported by protein structure relationships of flaviviruses and ‘flavi-like’ viruses underpins the taxonomic expansion and reorganization of Flavi...

🧬 Thrilled to share our latest paper in @natmicrobiol.nature.com 📄

A collaboration to give the Flaviviridae (home to Zika, Dengue & HCV) a much-needed taxonomic re-think.

Our at-scale AI structure prediction gave a complementary perspective on viral evolution.

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

Apart from the AI junk part… the notion that one should not offer a potential mechanistic explanation for an observation, without first spending years & (unavailable) $$ trying to test possibilities before sharing the observation with others (who may be better equipped to investigate the mechanism)…

FlyBase secures funding for year, but future still uncertain The FlyBase team’s fundraising efforts have proven successful in the short term, but restoration of its federal grant remains uncertain.

🪰 folks! I spoke to the Transmitter about FlyBase. As noted at flybase.org, bridge $ ran out and many staff were laid off.

Good news is stopgap contributions will keep core FlyBase operations active. But community support remains essential. Please donate @FlyBase and share! 1/2

tinyurl.com/FlyBase

Last chance to download my book for free! It's still available until tomorrow.

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Science is so much fun!

I'm so excited to share this with all of you!
This is the very first paper where I am the first author 🥹
Let me share some insights about our work 👇🧵(1/5):

How do persistent viral infections impact the host?

What happens when a fly becomes persistently infected by a virus?

Microbiome composition modulates the lethal outcome of Drosophila A virus infection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10....

🦖 Something HUGE just hatched.

Plasmidsaurus now offers RNA sequencing for gene expression analysis:
• As fast as 3 day turnaround
• $50/sample for academia, $80 for industry
• Up to ~10M unique transcript 3’ end reads per sample
• Interactive results

Explore Plasmidsaurus RNA-Seq today.

Persistent viral infections impact key biological traits in Drosophila melanogaster Persistent viral infections in insects are not as harmless as once believed. This study reveals how such infections in fruit flies alter survival, reproduction, behavior, and gene expression, offering...

3/3 Congratulations to @castellosanjuan.bsky.social for his first publication from his thesis! Thanks to @salehlabparis.bsky.social for the amazing team spirit and for letting me keep illustrating our work with cartoon flies.

Read the work here 👇 @plosbiology.org
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

2/3

...we found:

• Reduced fly lifespan (to varying degrees)

• Trade-offs between reproduction and immune defense

• Affected locomotion and remodeled sleep patterns, while preserving the circadian clock

• Each virus induces a different transcriptional response.

Cartoon illustration depicting a sick Drosophila melanogaster surrounded by different viruses, symbolizing the impact of persistent viral infections on the model organism. Image credit Rubén González.

1/3 What happens when a fly gets persistently infected by a virus? In our latest work, we established persistent infections to examine their impact on this model organism. By tracking four natural, persistent RNA viruses...

Dear JEDIs,
as we are self-organizing using the #EDRC as a nucleator we decided it is time for a JEDI database to boost our network! If you identify as a JEDI, please contact us here or send a mail to katja.rust@uni-marburg.de to be added to our database.
#Drosophila
@fly-eds.bsky.social

Plants respond to herbivory through sequential induction of cheaper defenses before more costly ones Plants encounter natural threats of varying intensity and respond by activating multiple defense traits. This study of six defense traits in Ambrosia artemisiifolia reveals that when attacked by insec...

Cheaper defense first, costly one later.
This makes sense.

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Virology lost one of his monuments, David Baltimore. To learn more about him and his contributions, I recommend (re)-listening to this great TWIV episode : www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-10...

if you have your team and grants, not forget to support @flybase.bsky.social www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...
meanwhile, we need to think longterm and protect this data, dl it, share it
portal.datarescueproject.org/datasets/fly...