All done with #Microbio26 in Belfast! Lots of fun as always.

Excited for #Microbio26! Really enjoying the education session so far. I'm speaking in the Genetics and Genomics forum, Hall 2B, at 16:45 tomorrow, about tandem repeats of an endogenous viral element in butterflies and moths 🦋🦋

I cherish this mug so much that I don't even use it for liquids..
And it's from the 1993 my beloved paper by Dolja and Koonin. I will forever be grateful for @thekatybrown.bsky.social for such a thoughtful gift! :)

Their work was also what got me into virology without any hesitation:)

🧬 Data scientists and enablers with experience in UK biomedical research: Your experience matters! MRC-funded research to tackle isolation & career barriers in biomedical data science roles.

app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/bio...
📅 Closes: 6/3/26
£50 Prize draw
Contact: integrate@imm.ox.ac.uk

I have a new preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... I found this endogenous retrovirus as a PhD student with @rtarlinton.bsky.social back in 2012 - a mere 14 years later we've written it up! This ERV is expressed in guinea pig lymphomas and might explain their high rate of lymphoma/leukemia. 💻🧪

It would be interesting to look! But it’s hard to find them.

Perfect summary!

also the post at the ToL slack was captioned

barger badger badger badger
virus virus
AAAAAAAHHH sponge sponge it's a sponge

Thank you! This is amazing!

comic doodle of a speaker in greys blacks and whites, with a red orange background, the topics include RNA viruses, a badger, and a sponge with viral spots.

really nice talk by @thekatybrown.bsky.social on fishing for viruses in our Darwin Tree of Life @sangerinstitute.bsky.social datasets 🎣🦠

#SciArt #sketchnote

Proud to have been a part of this! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

#bioinformatics #rnavirus #virology

+ all kinds of EVEs in arthropods! I also found a bunch of viral pathogens mislabelled as bacterial and explored "near miss" proteins - with probably coincidental similarity to RdRp. 5/5

I love EVEs so I spent time exploring and found orbivirus like EVEs in nematodes which pre-date species divergence and with a likely infectious counterpart, loads of diverse mitovirus-like regions in plants, and the first EVEs in the Perkinozoa phylum of protists 4/5

Initially I wanted to explore how complicated it is to use database proteins as a negative control when looking for viruses because so many are unlabelled viral sequences. But then I unexpectedly found hundreds of RdRp-like endogenous viral elements 3/5

I dug into proteins labelled as e.g. "unchacterised protein", "hypothetical protein" without any named function from any species in the NCBI protein and UniProt databases to find proteins related to RdRp 2/5

My paper is out! Uncovering hundreds of exogenous and endogenous RNA viral RdRp sequences amongst uncharacterised sequences in public protein databases. doi.org/10.1093/ve/v... 💻🧬 1/5 🧵

Title screen for "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway".

Screenshot from "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". In front of a green room that seems to be built out of giant circuit board pieces, there are close-up pictures of Jeff Jet and an NPC wearing glasses and a red sweater. A line of dialog is visible between them: "Good day to you!".

Screenshot from "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". The two main characters, Jeff and Donna, are standing near a road tunnel with a closed barrier gate in front of it and a guard standing by. There is a large truck loaded with gigantic ones and zeroes. The mouse cursor is hovering over these ones and zeroes, and the word "Bits" appears next to it.

Screenshot from "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". One of the main characters, Donna, stands in the middle of a large desert tent with visible patches and holes. A small office area has been set up behind her, with a woman sitting at a desk with a computer on it. There is an empty chair with a green coat lying on it in the foreground facing the desk. At the bottom of the screen, there is a row of inventory items. The mouse cursor is over one of them, a red and green magnet, with the word "Magnet" shown next to it.

I translated "Jeff Jet: Abenteuer InfoHighway" as "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway" archive.org/details/jeff... - a German promotional adventure game for Hewlett Packard from 1995.

Come to the BOKR session at 2:20 and see Charlotte Tumescheit @schnamo.bsky.social give a super interesting talk about improving prediction of molecular properties by incorporating ontologies. #ISMBECCB2025

Someone needs to implement an LLM to help select which talks to go to at #ISMBECCB2025

Come and see me in the ice rink if you want to plot phylogenies in matplotlib! Poster 206. GitHub.com/KatyBrown/plot_phylo #ISMBECCB2025

You ring the doorbell on Oncology, just show any card, they won't check, then go down two floors in the lift, around the corner and then up one floor, once you get outside climb over the fence, scrabble up the verge, sign in as a visitor and you're there.

It's the same in the UK. They specialise in roads which look like they link together but there's a huge fence or mysterious ditch blocking the way, or they've joined two buildings across the gap but not added a door to let people through.

I reformatted the #ISMBECCB2025 schedule a bit - in case anyone else wants to use it this way - ordered by day and start time:

csv: drive.google.com/file/d/1JyhT...

xlsx:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Thank you! This is amazing.

Excited for the ISMB/ECCB conference! I have two posters A520 today about an endogenous and exogenous virus I found in nematodes - and B206 tomorrow about my tool plot_phylo for drawing phylogenies in matplotlib. #ISMBECCB2025

And the same colour!

Is it so much to ask for all my bullet points to be 1. the same size and 2. in a straight line?

I could do my job in half the time if we just picked a column delimiter and stuck with it and then no-one can use that symbol for anything else. Let's not use * to both delimit columns and represent a stop codon, or use a random number of spaces, or put "_" in our sequence IDs. 🖥️🧪

From student to researcher, a #career in #science can come with a high price tag. @drcraigmc.bsky.social explores how wealth shapes opportunity in #STEM and proposes structural changes to support #equity and inclusion. 🧪
plos.io/4edGlY4