.@thebasepoint & I just put a long-marinated @biorxivpreprint up (https://t.co/oazdhedDq9). A spin-off of our California mosquito study (https://t.co/26SXQ0Lm4g), it's a love letter to Orthomyxoviridae & metagenomic virus discovery studies. Lots to unpack, so let's thread. 1/11
Science is a marathon & there's no country that prospered by politicising science or rejecting their own scientists. Political capital built on an anti-science platform is difficult to spend in a future where everyone is worse off. Find me on mastodon (@[email protected]).
@gonzamoratorio I frequently cite this paper as one of the success stories of metagenomic virus discovery since we first learned about jingmenviruses from metagenomic studies and only then found out their relatives cause disease in humans.
Are you interested in delivering reliable evidence from observational health care data? Do you find computational statistics and data science fascinating? I'd like to hire you as a Postdoctoral Fellow, so please email me directly! (Phylodynamic opportunities also available)
@Ricardo__JRH @K_G_Andersen@houzhou Agree that it can happen and one of the most fascinating examples has been H1N1/09 flu in West Africa (https://t.co/uaNBO5eWAM) but SARS-CoV-2s with transmission advantage seem prone to escape wherever they are & explode in cases. Our study on B.1.620 was an example of this.
"Chroma, give me the smallest possible protein with rRNA N-glycosylase activity that does not have billions of years' worth of evolutionary baggage that required every intermediate protein to carry out a beneficial function."
Maybe worth starting to think about implications now?
Bombali ebolavirus is distributed as far as Mozambique it turns out. It hasn't caused human disease (yet) but given that concurrent Ebola virus outbreaks have become common we should probably invest more in understanding the ecology of filoviruses. https://t.co/GTp7SA5UB3
Substantial expansion of the Flaviviridae through transcriptome mining - lots of new viruses in amphibians, reptiles, and ray-finned fish.
Transcriptome mining extends the host range of the Flaviviridae to non-bilaterians
https://t.co/P01Muwflj2