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Did you know that molecular phenotypes of human skeletal muscles are vastly different? Meet FANTOMUS, the skeletal muscles promoterome-proteome atlas:
doi.org/10.64898/202...
made with
@andreybuyan.bsky.social @nikitagryzunov.bsky.social @alforrest.bsky.social @sevamakeev.bsky.social
Posts by Alistair Forrest
Welcoming @KharchenkoLab to #HCA2026Asia! A leader in #SingleCell #Genomics. Checkout latest on segmentation doublets in #spatial data www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Join us in Fremantle in November events.humancellatlas.org/2026asia #HumanCellAtlas
All publications: tinyurl.com/22vk2uss
Welcoming Hae-Ock Lee to #HCA2026Asia! Applying #SingleCell #Genomics to lung cancer metastasis www.nature.com/articles/s41... and ICT elifesciences.org/articles/98366
Join us in Fremantle in Nov events.humancellatlas.org/2026asia #HumanCellAtlas
All publications: tinyurl.com/mtj7xms9
Welcoming Fuchou Tang to #HCA2026Asia! A true pioneer in #SingleCell #Genomics. From first scRNA-seq www.nature.com/articles/nme... to scHiC www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Join us in Fremantle in November events.humancellatlas.org/2026asia #HumanCellAtlas
All publications: tinyurl.com/4jstyd3e
Thanks to our confirmed sponsors!!
@10xgenomics.bsky.social @illumina @BusinessEventsPerth
@vizgen.bsky.social @elembio.bsky.social @Roche @SeekGeneBiosciences @genomicswa.bsky.social
More sponsorship opportunities available: tinyurl.com/568p8sry
30 speaking slots are available from the submitted abstracts with at least half dedicated to #ECR and #EMCR speakers. #SingleCell #Genomics #SpatialBiology #SpatialOmics #HumanCellAtlas
Excited to share currently confirmed speakers for HCA Asia 2026 (lnkd.in/gEQPj3Gk)!
#SingleCell #Genomics #SpatialBiology #SpatialOmics #HumanCellAtlas #SingleCell #transcriptomics #multiomics #Spatial_transcriptomics
@ozsinglecell.bsky.social
@lornegenome.bsky.social
Congratulations Hamid!
Registration is now open for HCA Asia in Fremantle. Come make friends with our nearby neighbours. Many talking slot for EMCRs!
@ozsinglecell.bsky.social @lornegenome.bsky.social #SingleCell #transcriptomics #multiomics #Spatial_transcriptomics
Registration for the HCA Asia Meeting on 2-4 November, 2026 is now open! The #HCA2026Asia meeting will be held in Perth, Australia, and online, and is hosted by @alforrest.bsky.social. Please register at buff.ly/gADDEnC
🖥️ 🧬 #Genomics #SingleCell #Spatial #HumanCellAtlas
A a figure showing comparison of connectomeDB2025 to other ligand-receptor pair databases.
connectomeDB2025: Quality matters!
✅3,579 ligand-receptor pairs supported by 2,803 papers
✅14 vertebrates
❌ >2,900 unsupported pairs from other DBs excluded
connectomedb.org
academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...
@JARamilowski @sakura_maezono @rui_hou_ @weitao_lin @yen_yeow + team
First ride and ocean swim of the year in the big blue antidepressant. There's beauty out there, fish, seaweed and seagrass.. and so far no stingers!
Australia’s hyper-competitive grant system is harming the very researchers working to improve our nation’s health. Chronic stress, relationship breakdowns, depression, burnout, self-medication, and, tragically, suicide are part of our sector's reality.
www.linkedin.com/posts/alforr...
Chances are you're about to lose. Science funding in Australia is now a gamble with terrible odds. #NHMRC Ideas success rates have hit 8.1% nationally, <4% in WA. Brilliant colleagues are leaving or quitting. We need change. www.linkedin.com/posts/alforr...
Australia: Low ARC success rates for early career researchers sparks anger (free to read): www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-aust...
Chelsea Mayoh at #abacbs2025: "If you're not using RNA-seq in your precision medicine program you're probably missing stuff"! Great to see @aliciao.bsky.social lab tools MINTIE, ALLsorts and TALLsorts making an appearance 🎉
Yes they have increased in average awarded amount. $822k in 2019, increasing each year to $1.23m in 2024.
When I took this job as the Head of a department, I never thought my job would involve consoling & moving on some of my most talented researchers at the end of each year - just bc their ARC/NHMRC grant didn’t get up. Having worked in multiple countries, I have never seen this normalised like in Aus.
The success rate for NHMRC Ideas Grants announced yesterday was just over 8%. That means 11 of every 12 people who applied got rejected. This is a culture changing level of rejection and frankly a point of national shame. This is a crisis for research.
I will not rest until we see this resolved.
Be kind to each other.. bad news for most coming in under embargo. We need more funding in the system...
Heading to Radelaide for #ABACBS2025 . Looking forward to catch up with old friends and nerd out on bioinformatics!
Checkout PhD student Peiwen Liu's poster on connectomeDB2025 (Quality matters!) connectomeDB.org
Now, with co-first authors Peiwen Liu (Australia) and
@sakura_maezono
(Japan), we’ve released v3 — 10 years on. 🎉
Rigorous QC: >2,900 unsupported pairs excluded.
3,579 validated ligand–receptor pairs across 14 vertebrates.
Check out connectomedb.org
In 2020 with then PhD student
@rui_hou_
we released the first update and released NATMI (Network Analysis Toolkit for Multicellular Interactions) for cell-to-cell communication network prediction from single cell and other datasets.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This has been a fun ongoing collaboration with
@JARamilowski
To see if we could build models of cell-to-cell communication based on ligand and receptor expression using the FANTOM5 data we published the first version in 2015 www.nature.com/articles/nco...
To support broader use, we annotated ligand and receptor reagents by species and expanded via orthology to 14 vertebrates.
connectomeDB2025 enables accurate cell–cell communication analysis across model systems and disease contexts. 🌏
Literature discovery is a major bottleneck. We used PerplexityAI to speed up identification of candidate papers and potential novel ligands/receptors.
Still manually validated ✅ but it helped us find 800+ new supported pairs. And expand the coverage of major L&R gene families
For every interaction, we required a publication with primary experimental evidence.
A substantial fraction of pairs in other databases were unsupported or misclassified — we excluded >2,900 low-evidence interactions.
We manually curated thousands of putative ligand–receptor pairs from existing resources (connectomeDB2020, CellChatDB_v2, CellPhoneDB_v5, ICELLNET_v2, CellTalkDB, LIANA).
For many entries we found no primary experimental evidence — rigorous QC really matters. 🔍
A a figure showing comparison of connectomeDB2025 to other ligand-receptor pair databases.
connectomeDB2025: Quality matters!
✅3,579 ligand-receptor pairs supported by 2,803 papers
✅14 vertebrates
❌ >2,900 unsupported pairs from other DBs excluded
connectomedb.org
academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...
@JARamilowski @sakura_maezono @rui_hou_ @weitao_lin @yen_yeow + team