Andrea Telatin
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telatin.bsky.social
Andrea Telatin
@telatin.bsky.social
520 followers 340 following 24 posts
Head of bioinformatics at the Quadram Institute - https://github.com/telatin/
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telatin.bsky.social
Andrea Telatin @telatin.bsky.social · Apr 10
Hello binfies 👋!

There is an open position for a senior bioinformatician to join our fab **core bioinformatics** team at @quadraminstitute.bsky.social.

jobs.quadram.ac.uk/Details.asp?...
Core Bioinformatics team at QIB -- job offer to join the team as bioinformatics programmer as per link
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social
Optimized k-mer search across millions of bacterial genomes on laptops https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.23.690050v1
November 26, 2025 at 4:47 PM
telatin.bsky.social
Ring validations are important. @quadraminstitute.bsky.social took part of this study from dna to analysis
November 16, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
jburnmurdoch.ft.com
Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments:

One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.
November 10, 2025 at 1:43 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
brianvan.bsky.social
So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!
November 9, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
quadraminstitute.bsky.social
⏰ Closing soon! We’re looking for a Research Scientist (Bioinformatics) to join the Laboratory of Dr Kai Cheng in our Food, Microbiome and Health programme

💷 £37,500 to £41,500
🗓️ Apply by 9 November 2025
➡️ buff.ly/DqLnYek
A social card with a digital illustration of of AI and the text "Research Scientist (Bioinformatics) to develop and apply computational methods for metaproteomics and multi-omics to advance precision microbiome research. Salary : £37,500 to £41,500, Contract length: 2 years, Apply by 9 November 2025"
November 1, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
clementsui.bsky.social
Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code
The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here, we designed and generated Escherichia coli with a 4-megabase synthetic genome in whic...
www.science.org
October 26, 2025 at 1:18 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
stephenturner.us
U.S. Biotech Future Is Now Made in China www.realclearworld.com/articles/202...
U.S. Biotech Future Is Now Made in China
This past year, oncologists across the United States faced an agonizing choice: Which cancer patients would receive their full, life-saving chemotherapy regimen and which would face delays or substand
www.realclearworld.com
October 15, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
stephenturner.us
From genotype to phenotype with 1,086 near telomere-to-telomere yeast genomes www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/HaploTeam/10...
October 15, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
erinyoung.bsky.social
"WGS-informed prevention could hypothetically generate net savings of €1.35 million annually if transmission was stopped once a clonal isolate was detected in a second patient."

I think that translates to ~1.5 million US dollars
Estimating the potential economic and health impact of integrated genomic surveillance in a hospital setting
Integrated genomic surveillance, combining whole genome sequencing (WGS) of bacterial isolates with patient movement data, promises improved detection…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 14, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
drgdavidson.bsky.social
🚨🔊 Fully funded PhD!! 🚨🔊

Are you interested in wildlife gut microbiomes? Love birds, fieldwork and bioinformatics? Want to join a collaborative and supportive team? Looking for training to become an independent scientist?

Please apply!

Informal enquiries welcome!

www.uea.ac.uk/course/phd-d...
October 10, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
bioinf.bsky.social
Interested in modelling metabolism from food -> gut microbiome -> blood ? 5 days left to apply for a fully funded position to investigate this. 👇👇👇
bioinf.bsky.social Falk Hildebrand @bioinf.bsky.social · Sep 13
We want to explore the metabolic interactions among gut bacteria, when the human host eats different foods - maybe this explain partly the Enterosignature structure?
Please do apply for our bioinformatic post to explore this question in metagenomes: jobs.quadram.ac.uk/Details.asp?...
September 25, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
rrwick.bsky.social
New blog post!

metaMDBG (@gaetanbenoit.bsky.social) and Myloasm (@jimshaw.bsky.social) have had recent releases, so I updated the benchmarks from the Autocycler paper:
rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a...

Both tools improved considerably! Time to update your conda environments 😄
Benchmark update: metaMDBG and Myloasm
a blog for miscellaneous bioinformatics stuff
rrwick.github.io
September 23, 2025 at 1:53 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
bugsinyourguts.bsky.social
If you are UK-based and working on any aspect of microbiomes (human, plant, insect, soil, animal, ...), please do sign up to Microbiome-Net for details of networking, funding and training opportunities.

forms.office.com/pages/respon...
September 13, 2025 at 6:31 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
mpercharde.bsky.social
Come be our head of bioinformatics at @mrc-lms.bsky.social !

Our bioinformatics team are closely involved with lots of interesting science and we love working with them. Topics inc. development, cancer, metabolism, aging, TEs (my favourite of course 😜) #TEsky lms.mrc.ac.uk/work/vacanci...
Head of Bioinformatics - MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences
We are recruiting for a Head of Bioinformatics to lead our Bioinformatics facility
lms.mrc.ac.uk
September 19, 2025 at 8:25 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
slowbikeiain.bsky.social
Lib Dems: We have 12x Reform's MPs, can we have the same coverage?

BBC: But Reform has 2x your poll rating. If there were an election tomorrow, they'd be running the country.

Lib Dems: So you're putting their people and policies under scrutiny, right?

BBC:

Lib Dems: Right?
September 21, 2025 at 9:25 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
mikeyearworth.bsky.social
"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...
www.computerworld.com
September 21, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
annizlab.bsky.social
X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀
• 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome)
• 3–579× lower inconsistency
• improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species
github.com/mathjeff/map...
bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma...
#microsky
Alignment algorithms represent a balance between speed and accuracy. We evaluated this balance across aligners, with accuracy measured by suboptimal alignments. We found that the relationship between alignment time (with 30 threads) and suboptimal alignment rates exhibits diminishing returns, where X-Mapper stands out as an outlier, offering the highest accuracy with competitive speed.
September 15, 2025 at 2:32 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
bioinf.bsky.social
We want to explore the metabolic interactions among gut bacteria, when the human host eats different foods - maybe this explain partly the Enterosignature structure?
Please do apply for our bioinformatic post to explore this question in metagenomes: jobs.quadram.ac.uk/Details.asp?...
September 13, 2025 at 8:35 AM
telatin.bsky.social
The AI hype is so wild that we know see charts like this and think that "must have made by AI".
Or are marketing teams worse than AI nowadays?
This is a bonkers chart used by OpenAI to advertise the capabilities of GPT-5. The y-axis reads "Accuracy (%)." The size of the bars does not match the labels, though.
August 8, 2025 at 8:15 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
bioinfoadv.bsky.social
🧪 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: “Structure-based metabolite function prediction using graph neural networks”   

Explore the full study here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf174

Authors include: @alisaadatv.bsky.social, @jannahastings.bsky.social
August 6, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
robertsaunders.bsky.social
The right-wing press is going mad over votes at 16 ("a naked attempt to twist democracy in Labour’s favour", an "election-rigging move"...)

Oddly, they said the same 100 years ago when the voting age for women fell from 30 to 21.

Let's revisit the Mail's campaign to"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly"...
Headline from the Daily Mail, 11 April 1927: "Stop the Flapper-Vote Folly!"
July 19, 2025 at 10:35 AM
telatin.bsky.social
Happy Independence Day ⭐️
July 4, 2025 at 4:32 PM
telatin.bsky.social
happy Transposon Day @yaasircheema.bsky.social and co :)
mollygale.bsky.social Molly Gale (Gale-Hammell Lab) @mollygale.bsky.social · Jun 16
🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025
Barbara McClintock portrait
June 16, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Andrea Telatin
quadraminstitute.bsky.social
🆕 Blog! We hear from some of our researchers about their experience of attending the #Biofilms11 conference which brought together experts in biofilms 🦠

➡️ buff.ly/rgQkywB

@dr-bilal-djeghout.bsky.social @jcihorton.bsky.social ‬ @hoyuliu.bsky.sociall
May 23, 2025 at 8:16 AM