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Duncan Ng

@duncan-ng.bsky.social

720 followers 860 following 460 posts

Bioinformatician (he/him) 👨🏽‍💻 @ Wellcome Sanger Institute 🇬🇧 PhD on nasal microbiome 👃🏼 @ KU & SSI 🇩🇰 Study S. aureus carriage in nasal microbiome 🦠 | Microbial ecology & genomics 📊🧬 Enjoys 🏃🏽‍♂️📸🐕 https://linktr.ee/duncan_ng

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Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · Aug 18

Maybe I’m in the wrong side of microbiome research 🍫

Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com · Aug 18

Out now!

🍫🦠A defined microbial community reproduces attributes of fine flavour #chocolate fermentation

By Gabriel Castrillo, David Salt & co

#microsky #microbiomesky 🧪

Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A defined microbial community reproduces attributes of fine flavour chocolate fermentation - Nature Microbiology

An in-depth microbiological and metagenomic analysis of Colombian farm and fermentation facilities resulted in the design of a defined microbial community that can reproduce the flavour of fine chocol...

www.nature.com

Reposted by Duncan Ng

Zamin Iqbal @zaminiqbal.bsky.social · Aug 17

"We show that unrelated proteins have a universal tendency towards convergent evolution of secondary and tertiary motifs, causing an excess of high-scoring FP alignment... previous methods routinely overestimate significance by up to six orders of magnitude."
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Protein structure alignment significance is often exaggerated

Machine learning has generated millions of high-quality predicted protein structures, creating a need for computationally efficient structure search algorithms and robust estimates of statistical sign...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Duncan Ng

Hall Lab @halllab.bsky.social · Aug 17

Really pleased to see this study led by @raymondkiu.bsky.social now published in @natcomms.nature.com!

We show that probiotics help modulate the preterm infant 👶#microbiome - to reduce ARGs, lower MDR bacteria 🦠 & increase beneficial Bifido ✨

Huge team effort!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Reposted by Duncan Ng

Tobias Warnecke @tobiaswarnecke.bsky.social · Aug 14

Archaea are often surrounded by bacteria. But is there ever active conflict between the two? Can archaea kill bacteria? If so, how do they do it?

Work by @romainstrock.bsky.social shows that some archaea can kill bacteria by secreting peptidoglycan hydrolases. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Archaea produce peptidoglycan hydrolases that kill bacteria

Archaea regularly interact with bacteria but reports of archaea killing bacteria are very rare. This study shows that many archaea encode peptidoglycan hydrolases, which specifically target bacterial ...

journals.plos.org

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Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · Jul 31

I definitely agree with you there. I ended up biting the bullet and paying for premium. The ads on my phone just makes the whole experience horrendous. 🫠

Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · Jul 31

Do you listen to ads on Spotify too?

Reposted by Duncan Ng

Casey Theriot @theriotmicrobe.bsky.social · Jul 21

New paper is out from our lab showing that some probiotics can accelerate and prolong the return of colonization resistance to C. difficile after antibiotics.
news.ncsu.edu/2025/07/prob...

Probiotics Can Help or Hinder Gut Recovery After Antibiotic Treatment

news.ncsu.edu

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Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · May 28

She should have tried harder and growled while she’s at it

Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · May 28

Is it… working?

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Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · May 28

Part of me still can’t believe it! It has been almost 6 years since the “eureka” moment of the paper 😬

Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · May 28

Got an email that my first first author paper from my PhD was accepted for publication! Cannot wait to talk about it! 🥳

a girl in a pink sweater is raising her arms in the air while a group of people are standing around her .

ALT: a girl in a pink sweater is raising her arms in the air while a group of people are standing around her .

media.tenor.com

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Reposted by Duncan Ng

Mike Blazanin @mikeblazanin.bsky.social · May 27

Excited to see this new, and extensively-rewritten, version of our preprint up now! With @paulturnerlab.bsky.social we show how bacterial population dynamics (e.g. growth curves) can be used to accurately quantify bacteriophage infectivity

🦠 🧫🔬 #microbiology #VirEvol

doi.org/10.1101/2023...

Quantifying phage infectivity from characteristics of bacterial population dynamics

A frequent goal of phage biology is to quantify how well a phage kills a population of host bacteria. Unfortunately, traditional methods to quantify phage success can be time-consuming, limiting the t...

doi.org

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Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · May 23

Reviewer number 2 will 100% accept that explanation.

Duncan Ng @duncan-ng.bsky.social · May 23

Maybe it’s better for him to find out what happens when you don’t understand the basics. A little experimentalist except we are all part of his experiment.