A poster announcing the next edition of the VEGA (Viral EcoGenomics and Applications) symposium, to be hosted on November 18-19, 2026 in the Pauley Ballroom at UC Berkeley. The text is surrounded by various drawings of phages and viruses, and an capsid-shaped Earth map.

🧬🦠🔬📣 First announcement for the 2026 edition of our Viral EcoGenomics and Applications symposium - VEGA26 will take place November 18 and 19 at UC Berkeley. We'll add more information at jgi.doe.gov/work-with-us... , but save the date already for 2 exciting days of viral ecogenomics !

Ecological strategies of bacteria shape inherent phage diversity in Atlantic salmon gut microbiomes Abstract. Understanding host-specific phage diversity is essential for deciphering the complex dynamics shaping microbial ecology and evolution. However, t

New paper! Host-specific phage diversity in Atlantic salmon gut microbiota shows distinct viral patterns. Phage pressure was minimal in host-dependent Mycoplasma-dominated guts but high with opportunistic Aliivibrio. Thanks to all co-authors! doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Ecological strategies of bacteria shape inherent phage diversity in Atlantic salmon gut microbiomes Abstract. Understanding host-specific phage diversity is essential for deciphering the complex dynamics shaping microbial ecology and evolution. However, t

Huge thank you to all the co-authors for a great collaboration! doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Meta-virus resource (MetaVR): expanding the frontiers of viral diversity with 24 million uncultivated virus genomes Abstract. Viruses are ubiquitous in all environments and impact host metabolism, evolution, and ecology, although our knowledge of their biodiversity is st

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

EVE Meeting Expression of Interest

I'm thinking of organising a meeting on endogenous viral elements (RNA, DNA and retroviral) - if you'd potentially be interested, please fill out the form here - forms.gle/wrCiWMw4yXZe... - so I can gauge interest. Please RT or share with anyone maybe interested! 🧪🧬🖥️🦠 #virology #bioinformatics

Assemblies of long-read metagenomes suffer from diverse errors Genomes from metagenomes have revolutionised our understanding of microbial diversity, ecology, and evolution, propelling advances in basic science, biomedicine, and biotechnology. Assembly algorithms...

I am very happy (and anxious) to share with you our most recent work in which we evaluated four of the most popular long-read assemblers,

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

and tell you just a little bit about it in the following 🧵

Diverse phage communities are maintained stably on a clonal bacterial host Bacteriophages are the most abundant and phylogenetically diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. In this study, w...

Is it “winner-takes all” when the simplest living things compete? Check out my fresh publication on phage coexistence in Science and a thread below🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our Big Fantastic Virus Database (BFVD) is now published NAR! It contains protein structure predictions of major viral clades, enhanced by petabase-scale homology search and it's explorable on the web.
🌐 bfvd.foldseek.com
💾 bfvd.steineggerlab.workers.dev
📄 academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Here is a great summary of genomic visualization tools: cmdcolin.github.io/awesome-geno...

Critically evaluating the relative importance of phage in shaping microbial community composition The ubiquity of bacteriophages (phages) and the major evolutionary and ecological impacts they can have on their microbial hosts has resulted in phages often cited as key drivers shaping microbial com...

Hello new phage phollowers!

I am shamelessly self-promoting mine and Angus Buckling's relatively new review "Critically evaluating the relative importance of phage in shaping microbial community composition"

www.cell.com/trends/micro...