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lbarquist.bsky.social
Assistant prof @ UofT, research group leader @ Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research. Pathogen systems biology / informatics / functional genomics. Coastal New Hampshirite. Drink Moxie.
100 posts 4,210 followers 1,344 following
Prolific Poster

Roche SBX preprint out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New comment Call for prudent use of the term #hypervirulence in carbapenem-resistant #Klebsiella pneumoniae www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... #ClinMicro #IDSky #AMR #OpenAccess #OA

I spent some time cleaning up my repo demonstrating how to use the NCBI Datasets REST API to do automated and/or bulk retrieval of genomes, by accession or by taxonomy. It's not super well documented but it does all seem to work :). Enjoy!

Our paper describing the microGWAS pipeline was published yesterday in Microbial Genomics. Lots of fixes and additions to the code/documentation since the preprint, including a hard to reproduce bug that only showed up in a specific HPC 🥵 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

If there's one thing you know about bacteria, it's that they're too small to see with the unaided eye, right? Wrong. Buried in the sediments around Caribbean mangroves is the largest known bacteria, Thiomargarita magnifica. It's the size of a human eyelash (~1 cm). (📷: Tomas Tyml)

Important work that changes the way we think about antibiotic resistance in vivo 🧪

I’m teaching a grad course for the first time (a bit terrifying 😅) and I’ve decided to write a short blog post after each lecture, that will highlight a key takeaway from it and reflect on what can be improved. First one ⬇️

Experimental evolution of evolvability | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Brochado and Maier labs in Germany are looking for a PhD student to study horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. ENDAMR Marie Curie doctoral network (endamr.eu) - an amazing opportunity to work with top scientists in the field all around Europe! www.cmfi.uni-tuebingen.de/mariecuriephd

Exciting opportunity to do a PhD in Germany with two truly excellent PIs working at the cutting edge of gene regulation in gut pathogens and commensals!

Exciting opportunity to do a PhD in Germany with two truly excellent PIs working at the cutting edge of gene regulation in gut pathogens and commensals!

📣Fully funded PhD position available in our lab at @uniwuerzburg.bsky.social, in collaboration with Dr. Connolly at Newcastle University (@ruamicro.bsky.social). "Dissecting the RNA-centric landscape of microbiota-pathogen interactions in the gut”. 🦠 Apply here: www.uni-wuerzburg.de/karriere/sin...

TIL when you sort the codon wheel by the second base the quadrants align with the properties of the amino acids being coded for and also it looks like the mystic sigil of the coven of the four bases journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Just published: My (Janosch Hennig) view on the current capabilities of AF3 and similar for RNA and protein-RNA complex structure prediction plus a bit of forward looking: doi.org/10.1002/cbic...

New preprint! How much does antibiotic use shape bacterial lineage dynamics, and how does that relate to the fitness costs/benefits of resistance determinants? All sorts of fun findings and a method that we hope will be broadly useful. See @dhelekal.bsky.social's thread and the preprint!

My Departments vs Software Accuracy article is finally out -- with great support from the Editors, and some useful feedback from referees. doi.org/10.1093/bioa... #benchmarks #bioinformatics #genetics #software #compsci

And another funky sRNA in Caulobacter, from Fröhlich lab #microsky #rnasky #rnabiology 🦠 academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Interested in collecting, sharing, and interacting with large collections of bacterial functional genomics data (RNA-seq, Tn-seq/TraDIS, etc.)? Check out our new web platform, Micromix, with case studies for Salmonella and Bacteroides! 🧫🧬🖥️🧪 Thread 1/n academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

The overview of AMR that you always wanted (someone else to write) - amazing! Truly brilliant paper with great figures! @lancetmicrobe.bsky.social www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Making LLMs run efficiently can feel scary, but scaling isn’t magic, it’s math! We wanted to demystify the “systems view” of LLMs and wrote a little textbook called “How To Scale Your Model” which we’re releasing today. 1/n

Interested in collecting, sharing, and interacting with large collections of bacterial functional genomics data (RNA-seq, Tn-seq/TraDIS, etc.)? Check out our new web platform, Micromix, with case studies for Salmonella and Bacteroides! 🧫🧬🖥️🧪 Thread 1/n academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

Most Shigella sonnei experimental work relies on a 70yr old lab strain that doesn’t reflect those circulating today - we are excited to share a (soon to be) publicly available set of genomes and isolates to fill that gap! An exciting part 2 featuring our favourite fish to follow very shortly… 🐟

Word on the street is that I am pretty good at helping people translate their domain expertise into productive Bayesian analyses, including designing models, implementing inferences, informing decisions, and summarizing results. I'm also available to hire, betanalpha.github.io/consulting/.

Don't forget to apply for the position as a Helmholtz Junior Research Group Leader at @helmholtz-hiri.bsky.social (HIRI) or @helmholtz-hioh.bsky.social (HIOH). ⏰ The application deadline on February 15 is coming up fast! 👉 More about the call: www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en/career/jo... @www.helmholtz.de

I'm very excited to share my first graduate research project! Check out our preprint which describes how data generated with directed evolution can be used to model the phenotypic effects of naturally-evolved sequence variants. (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#ResearchHighlight from Claire Chewapreecha @moru-mip.bsky.social Overcoming research challenges in resource-limited settings: perspectives from Thailand Invest in #LMIC talent for meaningful, lasting #impact Read more 👉 www.ndm.ac/tropmed.res-hi Full publication 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint from the group just landed ‘Staphylococcus haemolyticus is a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes in the preterm infant gut’ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... /1

This is an important problem. 👏

Interested in predicting AMR in bacteria? We show ignoring phylogenetic structure in genome collections leads to overly optimistic evaluations of machine learning methods for AMR prediction. With @nwheeler443.bsky.social and former PhD student Yanying Yu. 🦠🧫🧬🖥️🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm excited to present my work at the IIMCB in Warsaw! If you're interested, you can join on Zoom: 🗓️23.01.2025 🕘09:15 AM CET 💻Zoom: bit.ly/3NxdIbY

Do you make core genome alignments for phylogenomics? Mona Taouk and I explored how including sites with some missing data (a soft core) can improve analysis, especially for large datasets. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... (1/4)

This preprint makes a point that is valid for a lot of machine learning approaches. Organisms or genes are linked by evolutionary history; they are not independent. This results in correlation between learning and test sets, and often in over-optimistic evaluations of the methods' outcome.

Totally been sleeping on YDF, really feels like the proper successor to XGB. I mean, look at this classification report:

Very excited that my 1st first-author paper has just been published!! We present a novel mutant screening technique that can rapidly identify 100s of antibiotic resistance mutations, while evaluating how likely they are in different genetic backgrounds. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Important!

Interested in predicting AMR in bacteria? We show ignoring phylogenetic structure in genome collections leads to overly optimistic evaluations of machine learning methods for AMR prediction. With @nwheeler443.bsky.social and former PhD student Yanying Yu. 🦠🧫🧬🖥️🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What do bacterial cells do when they run out of nutrients? Although most bacterial studies focus on cells in exponentially growing states, in the wild bacteria likely spend most of their time slowly starving to death. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣Our latest paper is out now in mSystems: Not quite as it may seem - investigating #plasmid diversity and evolution in #Klebsiella pneumoniae at a single institution over time. A short thread 🧵 @zaminiqbal.bsky.social

Happy to share our latest work published in @pnas.org In collaboration with @yjchao.bsky.social , we uncovered an RNase III-processed sRNA, ManS, that orchestrates sialic acid metabolism in Salmonella enterica during gut colonization. Link: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Valuable contribution to the issue of how we ight look at data that have evolved in a hierarchical manner: www.nature.com/articles/s41...