Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · 4d

I definitely argued this case for my teddy bear up until I was about six years old...

Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Gabrielle Davidson @drgdavidson.bsky.social · 9d

📢🚨Please share! We’re hiring! 📢🚨Have a strong interests in wildlife ecology and gut microbiome bioinformatics? 3 year Senior Research Associate for NERC Pushing the Frontiers grant. Apply here: vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/18.... Informal enquiries welcome! drgldavidson.github.io/ACMEresearch

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · Jul 1

A new paper in The Lancet, one of the world’s foremost peer reviewed medical journals, estimates that USAID prevented 91 million deaths across 133 countries over 20 years.

The paper estimates that Elon Musk’s DOGE funding cuts to USAID will lead to 14 million deaths by 2030 (4.5 million children).

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

www.thelancet.com

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Sep 2

I think I've met everyone 🤔

Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Aug 21

Excited to be a part of this new paper with Alphey Lab- out in pre-print.
Multiplexing overrides resistance for #genedrive in Anopheles stephensi
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Multiplexing gene drives have high homing efficiencies

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Flo Débarre @flodebarre.bsky.social · Aug 18

This week, the capital of Evolution is Barcelona!
Over 1900 evolutionary biologists are gathering for the biennial meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, coorganised with its Spanish sister #ESEB2025.
Over 540 of us are on Bluesky! You can use these starter packs to connect: 1/n

Photo of the welcome address at ESEB2025

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Aug 18

This week I will having to be contending with some serious FOMO...

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Flo Débarre @flodebarre.bsky.social · Aug 14

Folks going to #ESEB2025 : To help people connect on Bluesky, I've started making starter packs. Here is a first one with the names that were available when I started.

Ping me if you want to be included in the next one!

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

We Are R-Ladies @weare.rladies.org · Aug 14

Let’s talk about career change. I loved listening to @minecr.bsky.social on The Test Set this week.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

She intially trained as an actuary, determined that she didn’t love that, and decided to do a PhD in statistics.

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel: Teaching in the AI era — and keeping students engaged

Podcast Episode · The Test Set by Posit · 08/11/2025 · 55m

podcasts.apple.com

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Aug 14

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate.

www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Aug 12

Devastating and idiotic.

It is a no-brainer for the UK to provide emergency funds to host the entirety of FlyBase out of Cambridge and pick up the bill on these salaries. Every individual in FlyBase is an international treasure any country would be lucky to have.

Dr Sian Gramates @drglam.bsky.social · Aug 11

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Fiona C @drfionac.bsky.social · Aug 6

FAQs on the #DecodeME #MECFS results

www.decodeme.org.uk/faqs/

FAQs - DecodeME

Our FAQs created by people with ME/CFS working with the project team and science blogger and patient, Simon McGrath. It will be updated as the project progresses.

www.decodeme.org.uk

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Aug 5

Takeaway: Gene drive success depends not just on design, but on natural population variation & rigorous analysis.
We must study drives across multiple species + account for real-world genetics to deploy them effectively.

Differing homing rates produce very different rates of population change

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Aug 5

This contrasts with Anopheles mosquitoes, where drives seemed highly efficient. But our study shows:
✅ Lower drive efficiency in Culex makes subtle effects easier to spot
✅ Choice of analysis is key — some methods can hide these mismatches in other systems.
#MosquitoControl #Genetics

Standardised effect sizes produce very different observed changes in homing when gene drive efficiencies are generally high, but are more noticeable when efficiencies are lower

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Aug 5

🚨New pre-print🚨
Natural DNA variation can slash CRISPR gene drive efficiency by up to 54% in Culex quinquefasciatus, a major West Nile virus mosquito vector.
<10% mismatch at the target site disrupts copying.
#GeneDrive #CRISPR
(with Tim Harvey-Samuel and Alphey Lab)
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Alleles that have mismatches compared to designed homology arms produce a significant drop in homing events while overall cleavage rates remain the same

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Karl Grieshop @karlgrieshop.bsky.social · Jul 9

Out now in @molbioevol.bsky.social with Michelle Liu (co-first), Ryan Frost, Matthew Lindsay, Malak Bayoumi, Martin Brengdahl, @ruxmolnar.bsky.social and @aneil-agrawal.bsky.social, we evolved ~40% of the D. melanogaster genome under male-limited inheritance, ...

academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Expression Divergence in Response to Sex-biased Selection

Abstract. It remains debated whether greater degrees of sexual dimorphism would evolve if not for intersexual genetic constraints. Here, we used experiment

academic.oup.com

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Jun 28

Thanks for the shout-out.
Can't take credit for the slide though.
I think I would recommend some bootstrapping before picking a rank-based test 😉

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Jun 24

👌

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Jun 24

Every time a new edition of this course starts, I get a little nervous.

Even though it always gets great feedback, this is a labour of love, and I want everyone to get the confidence in statistics that is essential for good science.

We start today, let’s go!
#rstats

Physalia-courses@Online @physaliacourses.bsky.social · Jun 19

📈 Want to strengthen your statistics skills? Join our course with @philipleftwich.bsky.social & learn how to use R for clear, reproducible data analysis — no prior experience required!
🔍 From descriptive statistics to Linear Models, GLMs, and GLMMs, we’ll guide you step by step.

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Eva Heinz @evaheinz7.bsky.social · Jun 5

We are still looking for a motivated student to join us in the wonderful world of mosquito microbiome genomies! Funding unfortunately only for UK students for this one. If interested, please send CV & letter of motivation (email in image below) #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 💻🧬 🧪Please share widely😊 1/2

Eva Heinz @evaheinz7.bsky.social · Feb 8

#PhD alert, here @unistrathclyde.bsky.social in the very friendly, diverse, artsy & welcoming city of Glasgow 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Disentangling the functional modules of #mosquito #microbiomes - what puzzle pieces build our #holobionts?

#MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 💻🧬🧪

More here 😊 www.strath.ac.uk/studywithus/...

Schematic overview of the PhD; combining bacterial genomes from a large collection to analyse adhesins, metabolic potential, bacterial warfare; and compare to other arthropod symbiontes and design a minimal microbiome.

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Jun 5

I've started giving the package to my students. We start with a clean dataset, they get to decide how 'awful' to be to their partner when making it messy. Then swap datasets to clean. They then evaluate each other's performance.

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · Jun 5

I'm really looking forward to delivering this talk about creating data for teaching and testing using the {messy} package for the @royalstatsoc.bsky.social Manchester Group!

📅 Thursday 10 July 2025
⌚ 1 - 2PM BST
📌 Online (everyone welcome!)

Register: rss.org.uk/training-eve...

#RStats #StatsEd

Screenshot of event page with the same details as in the post

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

UEA UCU says join a union @uea-ucu.bsky.social · May 6

⁉️Why are students at UEA supporting members of staff on strike?
📽️Watch this video to hear from the amazing students who came to join lecturers and professional services staff on the picket line.
📣Stop the cuts! #SaveUEA

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Philip Leftwich @philipleftwich.bsky.social · Apr 28

As seen on LinkedIn😂
Learning R in 2025...

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Reposted by Philip Leftwich

Earlham Institute @earlhaminst.bsky.social · Apr 26

💬 “Europe and the UK have in general been very good at recognising the need for FAIR data and #metadata, so I would say we are in a very strong position.”

📄 #AI and life sciences: why #FAIR #data is essential 💻 🗃️ 🧬

AI and life sciences: why FAIR data is essential

DNA sequencing has unlocked massive amounts of complex information. AI can help us analyse this. But it’s only effective with the right data.

buff.ly

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