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Reposted by Sophie Belman

James McInerney @jomcinerney.bsky.social · Aug 29

New preprint reveals bacteria can't just collect all resistance genes like Pokemon cards.
We found mutually exclusive evolutionary pathways to multidrug resistance in E. coli & P. aeruginosa - some resistance mechanisms actively prevent others from coexisting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Genomic constraints shape the evolution of alternative routes to drug resistance in prokaryotes

Background Variation within the prokaryotic pangenome is not random, and natural selection that favours particular combinations of genes appears to dominate over random drift. What is less clear is wh...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Marc Lipsitch @mlipsitch.bsky.social · Aug 25

Very pleased to share this newly published work with Aishani Aatresh, part of her exceptional Harvard undergrad thesis. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... .

What is the relationship between viral prospecting in animals and medical countermeasure development? | mBio

Sampling in animal populations to detect novel viruses before they infect humans has been a major activity justified by several considerations, notably by the idea that finding such viruses will stimu...

journals.asm.org

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Marc Lipsitch @mlipsitch.bsky.social · May 27

The Department of Health and Human Services has a process for making and updating recommendations like this, using expert scientists and clinicians. RFK is deliberately putting Americans' health at risk and sidestepping good science for political reasons.

STAT @statnews.com · May 27

#Breaking: RFK Jr. rolls back Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children, pregnant people buff.ly/1jKJGHi

RFK Jr. rolls back Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children, pregnant people

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he has unilaterally struck the recommendation that healthy children and healthy pregnant people get Covid booster shots.

www.statnews.com

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Tommi Mäklin @themaklin.bsky.social · May 26

New preprint: we used k-mer matching with suffix match length information to create an assembly-to-assembly alignment algorithm + software, kbo.

We wanted to create a reference-based aligner and variant caller that scales to at least 10-100k bacterial queries.

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

Sequence alignment with k-bounded matching statistics

Finding high-quality local alignments between a query sequence and sequences contained in a large genomic database is a fundamental problem in computational genomics, at the core of thousands of biolo...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Sonja Lehtinen @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social · Apr 7

New paper: long-term trends in antibiotic resistance show signs of stabilisation (thread). journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

The evolution of antibiotic resistance in Europe, 1998–2019

Author summary Antibiotic resistance is an important public health threat: resistant infections are currently associated with 5 million deaths per year globally. This burden may increase further in th...

journals.plos.org

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Schmidt Science Fellows @schmidtfellows.bsky.social · Apr 2

We are excited to announce our 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows! 32 early career researchers, nominated by the world’s leading research universities, who will take an interdisciplinary approach to advancing discovery schmidtsciencefellows.org/news/2025-fe...

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Nonia Pariente @npariente.bsky.social · Mar 25

Very interesting opportunity for a female African microbiologist.
@tuliodna.bsky.social @ckyobutungi.bsky.social

Please promote

EMBL @embl.org · Mar 25

1/ Last call for the EMBL-UNESCO Residency Programme! ⏳

If you’re a female African scientist working in infection biology, this is your opportunity to develop scientific skills while fostering collaboration across borders.

🙌 Apply until 31 March 2025.
www.embl.org/about/info/s...

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Billy Quilty @bquilty.bsky.social · Mar 7

Interested in pursing a PhD in infectious disease dynamics, artificial intelligence, and behavioural science?

Come and join myself and Professor Stefan Flasche at the Charité Center for Global Health in Berlin:

karriere.charite.de/en/job-vacan...

karriere.charite.de

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Sophie Belman @sophiebelman.bsky.social · Feb 27

A must read opinion piece.

Madhu Pai, MD, PhD @madhupai.bsky.social · Feb 26

10 years ago, when I began teaching global health, my courses were mostly the 'blue pill' version

Slowly but surely, it has become reddish

Every year brings more improvement & reflection

@shashikalb.bsky.social & @ananyatb.bsky.social have been great co-teachers

journals.plos.org/globalpublic...

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

John Green @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social · Feb 25

This is a gut-wrenching, beautifully written essay. A doctor must watch helplessly as children die because USAID's freeze on aid has limited access to nutritional supplements. time.com/7258248/us-f...

What Gutting USAID Means for My Young Patients in Burundi

“To my patients and their mothers, I offered apologies from the American people,” writes Dr. Jennifer Furin.

time.com

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Alt CDC (they/them) @altcdc.altgov.info · Feb 14

Goodnight friends. We end today with this quote for ourselves and for our new secretary of HHS.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.
― Albert Camus, The Plague

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Sophie Belman @sophiebelman.bsky.social · Feb 9

My working hours are spent trying to understand a major cause of pneumonia and meningitis globally and it would be great if my next 16 weeks of training hours could help mitigate disease too!

Sophie Belman @sophiebelman.bsky.social · Feb 9

I’m racing a Half Ironman triathlon this June. 2km swim, 90km cycle, 20km run and raising money for the Meningitis Research Foundation.
Meningitis has ~2.5 million cases and 250,000 deaths annually predominantly among children. Any donation would be great!

gofund.me/a958252f

Donate to Half Iron(wo)man for Meningitis Research, organized by Sophie Belman

I will be racing my first Half Ironman triathlon in Zurich this June. It includ… Sophie Belman needs your support for Half Iron(wo)man for Meningitis Research

gofund.me

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Nick Loman @pathogenomenick.bsky.social · Jan 30

Our mSCAPE project has been formally announced to the world by @smhopkins.bsky.social at #FOG2025 today: www.gov.uk/government/n... - a really exciting academic-public health collaboration to build a surveillance platform leveraging NHS metagenomic diagnostic data. @meerac.bsky.social

UKHSA launches new metagenomic surveillance for health security

The UK launches mSCAPE, a world-first metagenomics initiative by UKHSA to enhance health security through rapid pathogen detection and surveillance.

www.gov.uk

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Noémie Lefrancq @noemielefrancq.bsky.social · Jan 2

Incredibly excited to share that our manuscript was just published in @nature.com ! What a way to start the new year! 🎉
https://buff.ly/4gyYCzx

We present phylowave, a framework that enables to learn the fitness dynamics of pathogens from phylogenies.

🧵 A thread... 1/n
#IDSky #IDModelling

Learning the fitness dynamics of pathogens from phylogenies - Nature

Phylowave, an innovative phylogenetic approach, can identify the main circulating pathogen lineages with increased fitness and the associated genetic changes, enabling the timely identification of…

buff.ly

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Ross Fitzgerald @jrossfitz.bsky.social · Dec 4

New MRC-funded postdoc with me on comparative bacterial genomics/phylodynamics @roslininstitute.bsky.social university of Edinburgh. Great multidisciplinary team and collaboration with partners at Shanghai Jao Tong University.
elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

PDRA in Bacterial Genomics

We are looking for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Bacterial Genomics at the Laboratory for Bacterial Evolution and Pathogenesis (www.ed.ac.uk/roslin/research/divisions/bacteriology/lbep) at The...

elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com

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Sophie Belman @sophiebelman.bsky.social · Dec 5

Had a great whirlwind of a trip to Tokyo for #SMBE workshop on pangenomics with an inspiring community of people. Fun to present preliminary results on the environment and the pneumococcus! Thanks to #isppd and #schmidtsciencefellows for my funding and the organizers for my registration bursary.

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bioRxivpreprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · Nov 30

A Portable and Scalable Genomic Analysis Pipeline for Streptococcus pneumoniae Surveillance: GPS Pipeline https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.27.625679v1

Ever increasing global sequencing capacity provides an unprecedented opportunity in utilising genomi

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Kate Baker @ksbakes.bsky.social · Nov 29

There are four (that's right four!) academic posts open at the School of Biological sciences at Cambridge University. Check them out here: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/?categor... Gr10/11 (AssocProf/Reader; now Prof) Closing 26/1/25. Looking for excellent, collaborative people. Spread the word!

Job Opportunities - University of Cambridge

Current Academic jobs at the University of Cambridge.

www.jobs.cam.ac.uk

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Rebecca Gladstone @becctococcus.bsky.social · Nov 27

How invasive are different E .coli capsules and how many are there? Find out here and use the group 2 and 3 database to type your own!
medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Group 2 and 3 ABC-transporter dependant capsular K-loci contribute significantly to variation in the invasive potential of Escherichia coli

The major opportunistic pathogen Escherichia coli is the largest cause of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) associated infections and deaths globally. Considerable antigenic diversity has been documented...

medrxiv.org

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Reposted by Sophie Belman

Kim R. van Daalen @daalenkim.bsky.social · Nov 18

🚨In our new Lancet Planetary Health 📰 #COP29 we discuss the climate-health-gender nexus by

🔎 reviewing gendered health impacts of #climatechange
⌛️ summarising gender & health in UNFCCC processes
📉 assessing the gender gap in delegations at COP1-28

Full ➡️ 👀 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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