Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · 6d

www.thetimes.com/life-style/c...

My stomach churned as I saw the news: it was my old Shul in my home city

Emma Barnett’s shock at today’s terrorist attack was amplified when the presenter realised it had taken place where her family once worshipped

www.thetimes.com

Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Jayna Raghwani @jraghwani.bsky.social · 9d

Excited to share that our paper on the relationship between viral load and metagenomic outputs in wildlife samples is now published in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety! 🎉 Fantastic collaboration with a brilliant team.

More info: 📖 tinyurl.com/ywb7tvjm

Quantifying viral load and characterizing virus diversity in wildlife samples with target enrichment sequencing

Metagenomics is a powerful tool for characterizing viruses, with broad applications across diverse disciplines, from understanding the ecology and evolutionary history of viruses to identifying causat...

tinyurl.com

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Bloom lab @jbloomlab.bsky.social · 29d

In new study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social, we provide near real-time data on human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza by measuring ~26,000 titers to >100 recent viral strains

Data can inform vaccine selection & evolutionary/epidemiological modeling
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Near real-time data on the human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza virus to inform vaccine-strain selection in September 2025

The hemagglutinin of human influenza virus evolves rapidly to erode neutralizing antibody immunity. Twice per year, new vaccine strains are selected with the goal of providing maximum protection again...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

BK. Titanji @boghuma.bsky.social · Sep 5

In under 24h following the newly identified outbreak of #Ebola in the DRC, the virus has been isolated, sequenced and the virus sequence data made publicly available.
virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

The 16th Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in Bulape Health Zone, Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo: A new spillover event from an unknown reservoir host

Background The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is currently facing concurrent outbreaks including mpox, cholera and malaria (1-4). The Ministry of Public Health, DRC has declared the 16th Ebola...

virological.org

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Aug 29

About time!

Ed Hutchinson @socialinfluenza.bsky.social · Aug 29

BBC News - Children to be offered chickenpox vaccine on NHS
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Children offered chickenpox vaccine on NHS

All young children in England and Wales will be offered a free chickenpox vaccine by the NHS from January 2026.

www.bbc.com

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Tom Peacock @peacockflu.bsky.social · Aug 21

Really excited to have been a part of this study, lead by @willharv.bsky.social on how reassortment of H5N1 in birds has lead to a 'specialist' genotype that thrives in seabirds and drives summer/spring (rather than winter) waves of poultry outbreaks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Genetic reassortment and diversification of host specificity have driven evolutionary trajectories of lineages of panzootic H5N1 influenza

Since 2021, subclade 2.3.4.4b A(H5N1) high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) viruses have undergone changes in ecology and epidemiology, causing a panzootic of unprecedented scale in wild and domes...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

John Tregoning @prof-tregoning.bsky.social · Aug 14

We have a new research assistant role co-supervised with @cjohansson-lab.bsky.social

Working on #vaccines and #immunology

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOH045/r...

@imperialmed.bsky.social

Research Assistant in Vaccine Immunology at Imperial College London

Discover Research Assistant in Vaccine Immunology jobs and more in higher education on jobs.ac.uk. Apply for further details on the top job board.

www.jobs.ac.uk

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Will Ratcliff @wcratcliff.bsky.social · Aug 12

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Tamar Kohn @viralexplorers.bsky.social · Aug 11

Want to move to Switzerland? We are looking for a postdoc to study airborne viruses:
careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...

@linseymarr.bsky.social @lakdawalalab.bsky.social @corsiaq.bsky.social @influenzal.bsky.social @chuckhaas.bsky.social

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · Jul 17

This is quite late but our lab has a preprint out about a SARS-CoV-2 situation we had in mink in Lithuania back in 2021. It's a doozy with re-emergence of extinct lineages, a country-wide test of all mink farms in Lithuania & some interesting dynamics in mink. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/5🧵

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Jul 8

Something a little different.
If you're looking for interesting science to engage with older school children, I would like to plug my students' work on cow flu - where it came from and what risk it might pose.
doi.org/10.1042/bio_...

PS> Not peer reviewed but was fun to help write!

Cross-species concerns: how worried should you be about cow flu?

In 2024, H5N1 avian flu jumped from birds into cows for the first time. Replicating in cow udders and spreading via milk, the virus rapidly infected dairy cows across the USA. The flu virus also manag...

doi.org

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · Jun 19

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

The Missing 11th of the Month - David R Hagen

Personal website of David R Hagen, scientific software engineer

drhagen.com

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Daniel Hurdiss @danielhurdiss.bsky.social · Jun 18

Latest preprint from the lab, many years in the making!

By combining #cryoEM with #AlphaFold3 modelling, we propose that norovirus NS3 forms a transmembrane RNA translocase.

This could have big implications for our understanding of viral replication & assembly (🧵)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Jun 10

If you are interested in influenza emergence, please check out and use the beautiful figures all made by @fcapelastegui.bsky.social.

Another beautiful figure from Capelastegui & Goldhill 2025.
Pandemic staircase adapted from Long et al. 2019 showing the transition of AIV to the human seasonal virus. Key steps for mammalian and human adaptation are polymerase changes, HA mutations which confer α2,6 sialic acid preference and finally fine-tuning of viral fitness.

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Jun 10

Excited to present the first review from my lab!
Which mutations allow H5 influenza to jump into humans or other mammals? How close is H5 to a pandemic? This review has the answers and explains the molecular mechanism behind the mutations.
Led by @fcapelastegui.bsky.social.
doi.org/10.1099/jgv....

A beautiful figure.
Global detections of A(H5N1) clade 2.3.4.4b in mammalian species, split by sporadic detections (black) and detections which are associated with an outbreak (orange) alongside key mammalian adaptive mutations.
Taken from Capelastegui & Goldhill 2025.

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Jun 9

This is a really friendly meeting for influenza virologists. Great for PhD students and anyone else working on flu.

Influenza Update Meetings @influenzaupdate.bsky.social · Jun 4

SAVE THE DATE!
The 2025 Influenza Update Meeting will be held ‪@uni-of-warwick.bsky.social on the 15th and 16th December - ‪@nicolerobb.bsky.social‬ is leading the organisation for this year's event.
We hope you'll join us there - please repost!
www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/...

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · May 29

Should you drink flu-infected raw milk? Obviously no but now you can put numbers on how bad an idea this is.

Ed Hutchinson @socialinfluenza.bsky.social · May 29

If you don't pasteurise it, how long can H5N1 influenza viruses stay infectious for in milk?
We had a look at this in a new preprint with ‪@cvrinfo.bsky.social‬, @roslininstitute.bsky.social‬, ‪@pirbrightinst.bsky.social‬ & the APHA (1/N)
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Woodcut of a Highland Cow (Ed Hutchinson, 2025). The highland cow is staring rather pugnaciously through a square frame, possibly because it is very keen to inform you that it is a member of a predominantly Scottish breed of cattle and that the bovine H5N1 outbreak under discussion is, in fact, currently confined to the mainland USA

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · May 23

Finishing virology/biology PhD students, postdocs in need of a job- this is a lab you should join! Am I biased? 100% yes- because I know that the Sheppard lab will be an awesome place to work and you'll do great science. Spread the word!

Tom Peacock @peacockflu.bsky.social · May 22

Great opportunity to work on influenza virus-host factor interactions in a brand new lab at Imperial (led by a friend and collaborator, Carol Sheppard)
www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Description

Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

www.imperial.ac.uk

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Antoni Wrobel @agwrobel.bsky.social · May 6

We are currently seeking an ambitious, motivated, and hard-working scientist to join my lab (wrobel-lab.org) at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Oxford as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. If interested, please go here directly: tinyurl.com/postdoc-wrob... or read more below.

Wrobel lab | Explore Mechanisms of Viral Infection studied at Oxford Biochemistry Department

Discover our research on viral evolution and host interactions. Join our team and stay updated with the latest lab news and publications.

wrobel-lab.org

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · May 6

With NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya dismissing my reporting as "false" and "spreading rumors" hours before releasing a policy that confirmed said "rumors," I feel compelled to respond.

Here's an inside look into how this story was reported. It was a weird one. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

On a Nature news article reporting that NIH planned to suspend subawards for foreign collaborations:
“No, that’s false. There’s going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money’s going.”

“I’m really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you’re like, actually spreading rumors that you don’t know anything about. … Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that’s not true.”

“We’re working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn’t be reporting rumors. I know there’s leaks all over here, but the leaks don’t actually reflect what’s happening. Don’t write about rumors. It actually makes the things that you and I care about worse. Like it spreads panic.”

Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Apr 3

Congratulations! Looking forward to seeing the research that will come out of this. Good luck!

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Reposted by Daniel Goldhill

Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · Apr 3

We're looking for a PhD student to join us at Vilnius University in Lithuania. We work on RNA virus evolution computationally but we'd like to generate more mosquito RNA virus sequence data. Official ad: www.gmc.vu.lt/en/doctoral-.... Please share & continue reading if interested.

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Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Apr 1

The tainted cup - Robert Jackson Bennett- was just a really fun read.

Daniel Goldhill @influenzal.bsky.social · Mar 28

Interesting. Strongly suggests that not entirely random whether these farms have been infected.

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