The global mycology community calling for an effort to combat drug‑resistant - Closing the gap on antifungal resistance www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First day back after a great time in Belfast at #MicroSoc26 @microbiologysociety.org. Thank you to the organisers for the opportunity to present my work. Which, if you missed, is now currently available on bioRxiv!

Air pollution making people in UK get long-term illnesses earlier, study finds Pollution is ‘silent accelerator that robs individuals of their healthiest years’, say researchers

"Air pollution acts as a silent accelerator that robs individuals of their healthiest years.”

My latest piece for @theguardian.com on research on 396,000 people in the UK.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Without them there is no life’: the race to understand the mysterious world of Africa’s fungi Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, African scientists are championing the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna

Fungi make so much of life on earth possible—but are too often left out of conservation.

That's slowly starting to change. As it does, a cohort of mycologists across Africa are pioneering the study and conservation of fungi in their home countries. My latest: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

GitHub - bacpop/ggCaller: Bifrost graph gene caller. Bifrost graph gene caller. Contribute to bacpop/ggCaller development by creating an account on GitHub.

ggCaller v1.5.0 is out! We've removed the integrated clustering to enable users to benefit from new Panaroo features. Now, ggCaller generates GFFs that can be used with any clustering method. But for fans of an integrated ggCaller pangenome workflow read on...

github.com/bacpop/ggCal...

New review article

WHO assessment of the preclinical #antifungal pipeline: evaluating innovation and preparedness in the face of emerging fungal threats

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

#IDSky #ClinMicro #MycoSky #OpenAccess #OA

Researchers launch forecasting challenge to help predict severe patient harm in NHS hospitals Researchers have launched a new data science challenge aimed at improving the ability of NHS hospitals to anticipate and prevent severe patient harm.

Develop a forecasts of severe patient harm to be used by the NHS!
Every 4-hour delay in Emergency Department admission increases 30-day mortality risk by 8%: join the SPHERE forecasting contest and help the NHS reduce delays before they happen!
Find out more here: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/article...

Transposable elements hitchhike on Starships across fungal genomes - Nature Communications Large mobile genetic elements known as Starships act as vehicles for transferring transposable elements (TEs) between fungi. Here, Griem-Krey et al. show that these ‘hitchhiking’ TEs can drive rapid e...

Now out!
We show that TEs can be horizontally transferred between fungal species via Starships. Once transferred, these TEs can become active, changing the genome organization and affecting the lifestyle of the recipient fungus.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@oggenfussursula.bsky.social #TEsky

Excited to share our latest work:
“Antarctic marine microplastics reveals environmental persistence and rapid evolution of Candida auris.”

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

This study explores how environmental microplastics may act as reservoirs for Candida auris.

🧵

YouTube Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

✨NEW EPISODE✨ #ScienceInContext This week @eonore.bsky.social speaks with Prof Nicholas Grassly & Dr Joyce Akello about wastewater surveillance as early warning of viruses with pandemic potential & the WASPP Network👇
youtu.be/7sbL-Eq9U7A
@imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @gatesfoundation.bsky.social

A journey to run a polymerase chain reaction in the kitchen Did you know an air fryer can thermocycle?

Did you know an air fryer can thermocycle? Read the journey of two scientists’ attempts to run a PCR cycle in the kitchen, in the latest feature in #TheMicrobiologist.
www.the-microbiologist.com/features/a-journey-to-ru...

🌟 New at #Fungal26—the inaugural Fungal Spore Lecture featuring Matthew C. Fisher (Imperial College London).
Working at the One Health interface, Fisher explores how antifungal use and global trade are reshaping the Fungal Kingdom. Join us for his lecture: buff.ly/oCNlI2l

MycoMobilome: a community-focused non-redundant database of transposable element consensus sequences for the fungal kingdom Abstract. Transposable elements (TEs) are found in nearly all eukaryotic genomes. Despite significant advances in the sequencing of genomes, TE resources r

Need to annotate transposons in fungal genomes? 🧬
Good news #MycoMobilome is now live! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/narg...
Access the sequences through our Zenodo community (you can also contribute seqs with credit), and synchronisation with @dfam.bsky.social!

w/ @danielcroll.bsky.social

Poster of the call for abstracts fir the BMS Annual Scientific Meeting, with a photo of the Royal Holloway campus building at sunset..

📣 Call for Abstracts - British Mycological Society 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting. Inviting researchers, early-career scientists, postgraduate students, & practitioners to share their latest research👉 Event webpage & abstract submission: www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/asm.html
#BMS2026

New study in @nature.com finds pesticides in 70% of soils sampled across Europe, showing they suppress beneficial arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Authors call for assessing pesticide impacts on entire soil communities to better protect soil biodiversity.

Link to paper: buff.ly/wJzWiYB

How do bacterial pangenomes evolve, what controls their dynamics, why do they exist?
Fitting a mechanistic model to 450 species from allthebacteria.org suggesting fast vs slow gene exchange (i.e. amount of MGEs) is a major differentiating factor, correlated with phylogeny rather than lifestyle

At long last, my final PhD chapter is out: we developed a novel evolutionary simulator of bacterial pangenomes, Pansim, fitting it to data from >600K genomes using a likelihood-free framework, PopPUNK-mod, to explore neutral and adaptive pangenome dynamics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Rarefaction is better than robust Aitchison PCA and other compositional data analysis methods at controlling for uneven sequencing effort Amplicon sequencing typically results in a wide distribution in the number of sequences obtained from each sample. How best to account for this variation has been a persistent problem in the microbial...

New paper up on bioRxiv! This is my third and hopefully final paper on rarefaction. It's still better than the other available methods.

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

Troubleshooting common errors in assemblies of long-read metagenomes - Nature Biotechnology Long-read sequence assemblies from metagenomes contain frequent errors.

Really important read for people working with long-read MAGs.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔥 New study on invasive #mold infections in severe #burn patients. These infections affect ~20% of cases and are hard to distinguish from colonization. We analyzed 6,000+ samples from 276 patients to identify strategies that could improve mycological diagnosis.

🔗 bit.ly/4a4l6I0

Really proud of former PhD student Hugh Gifford for wrapping up this massive project, looking at almost 13k whole genome C. auris sequences 1997-2024! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ecosystem destruction will force the UK to tackle food security The UK’s approach to food makes it increasingly vulnerable in an unstable world. A great food transformation with a focus on resilience is urgently needed, argues Paul Behrens Last week the UK gover...

I wrote an op-ed for the @bmj.com on the UK government's national security assessment on ecosystem collapse and how we need act.

This report was released last week, delayed by months—allegedly it was seen as too negative by number 10—and abridged🧵

www.bmj.com/content/392/...

A graphic with dark blue background showing orange smoke‑cloud icons and text about Clean Air Night. The message reads: ‘We all want to stay warm this winter… but cosiness shouldn’t cost the health of our communities. This #CleanAirNight share the uncomfortable truth about wood burning.’ Logos for Clean Air Night, Global Action Plan, and Impact on Urban Health appear at the bottom, along with the date 22 January 2026.

Many aren't aware that burning wood at home can seriously impact indoor and outdoor air quality. Tonight is Clean Air Night - learn about how to protect your health and your home:

www.actionforcleanair.org.uk/campaigns/cl...

We're Hiring! We're looking for a postdoc with bioinformatics/modelling skills to join us in an exciting microbiome ecology project in Manchester (deadline 1st March) www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Microscopic view of a colony of Aspergillus fungi ©Gilnature/iStock

It’s World Aspergillosis Day! This article published in JMM examines the prevalence of azole resistance among clinical Aspergillus isolates. Read more about these resistance patterns here: https://doi.org/10.1099/jmm.0.002112
#WorldAspergillosisDay

Imperial and DNDi strengthen partnership to accelerate treatments for neglected diseases Researchers from Imperial College London and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) met on 19 January to strengthen a growing partnership...

On #WorldNTDDay, @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social + @dndi.org strengthen their partnership to speed up new treatments for #NeglectedDiseases affecting 1 billion+ people worldwide. 🌍

From #AI to drug discovery, we’re working to turn science into real-world impact.

www.imperial.ac.uk/news/article...

Earlham Institute and Natural History Museum launch deep tech startup Agnos Biosciences™ This new technology is a method for characterising biological particles in the air using a combination of novel molecular biology, DNA sequencing and bespoke computational analysis.

📣 Today Earlham Institute and @nhm-london.bsky.social announce a joint venture spin-out company Agnos Biosciences and its cutting-edge rapid #air #sequencing technology, AirSeq, to transform biological threat detection.

@ukri.org @richardmleggett.bsky.social

Worried about plastic in your brain? Scientists say otherwise Claims that microplastics are contaminating the human body and threatening our health may have been exaggerated, experts say

“Take a breath before drawing conclusions.”

Professor Leon Barron from @imperialsph.bsky.social says some #microplastics studies may be overstated, and that more robust #research methods are needed before alarmist headlines.

More via @thetimes.com 👇 www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

Emerging terbinafine-resistant Trichophyton indotineae between 2018 and 2023: a multinational genomic epidemiology study That no clear geographical clustering of isolates was observed confirms the rapid transcontinental spread of T indotineae from its likely centre of diversity in Asia. Our findings highlight the import...

Emerging terbinafine-resistant Trichophyton indotineae between 2018 and 2023: a multinational genomic epidemiology study - The Lancet Microbe www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

This year, the taxonomists on the Fungarium Sequencing Project had a goal to review 10,000 specimens. They hit their target an impressive three months ahead of schedule, so to celebrate their hard work, here are some of the stories they’ve uncovered!