Great opportunity for folks interested in starting their own group (or moving an existing group) working in the areas of livestock viruses or immunology, zoonotic diseases, vaccinology, or insect vector biology! Come work with us!

Great opportunity for early career researchers looking to take their first step towards independence in the area of zoonotic or veternary virology, immunology, or epidemiology!

I am delighted to share the latest preprint from our lab, which was work that was conceived and led by Jeannette Tenthorey during her postdoc and during the first few months of her independent lab at UCSF.

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

TL;DR: Indels matter. A lot.

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With #H5N1 #birdflu spreading amongst dairy cows, one of the most important things to think about right now is what would need to happen for this virus to actually start a pandemic.
I'm on a train, so a brief thread...

Many people are wondering how we can monitor this H5N1 situation. We sequence the whole virome from wastewater, and, well, H5N1 started showing up in our samples.

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
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New #H5N1 wastewater preprint from UT/Baylor under Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute (TEPHI) protocols.

H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b signal seen in facilities covering 9 TX cities.
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

.Dept. of Agriculture reports 6 new herds that have tested positive for #H5N1 #birdflu today, the first new confirmations since 4/25.
No new states reporting. Four new herds in Michigan and one apiece in Idaho and Colorado.
aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poul…

The thing that most strikes me about the current #H5N1 #birdflu outbreak in cattle (and terrifies me to some extent) is how much the virus surprised us once again. And how cavalier our response seems in the face of that fact.

After 10 months off for my science journalism fellowship at MIT I’m jumping back into infectious disease reporting and uh boy I’m not gonna be bored am I?!

Here's a first story on #h5n1 in cows (and I'll try to write a thread later):
science.org/content/articl…

Glad to see this preliminary analysis of #influenza sialic acid receptors in the bovine mammary glad. But I worry people are WAY overinterpreting a narrow methodology, re: mixing vessel. We have a lot more to learn. #H5N1

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Out now on Virological Posts: preliminary report on the genomic epidemiology of H5N1 sequences in cattle. This complements the preprint Dept. of Agriculture put out yesterday.

There was a lot of data to work with, so it's split in two parts 👇🏼
virological.org/t/preliminary-…
virological.org/t/preliminary-…