In humans, sub unit vaccines are often designed around predicted t cell epitopes. What you would focus on in species without an adaptive immune response is such an interesting question! 🧬🖥️🧪
The Indian muntjac deer only has 6 or 7 chromosomes, less than any other mammal 🦌 because in the last 5 million years their chromosomes have fused together 26 times! 🧬 🖥️ #chromosome #deer
I recently learnt that muntjac deer are native to South East Asia. At the start of the 1900s a handful escaped from a private collection at Woburn Abbey. Despite this population bottleneck, there are now over 100,000 in the UK
DAWells
Using open source resources viralrecon and pathoplexus, it only took 3 days from declaring an outbreak to reporting the viral genomes as district from previous Bundinugyo outbreaks. 🖥️🧬 virological.org/t/initial-ge...
Very happy to say that the 🧬 🖥️ tool HLAfreq is now published doi.org/10.21105/joss.10122
Use it to combine HLA allele frequency datasets. I made it to help vaccine design but love seeing it put to other uses. Let me know if it's useful to you! 🧪 #hlafreq
New flu study shows that when you feel worse, you're probably spreading more virus particles. 🧪In particular, coughing, runny nose, and feeling bleh were correlated with virus particles expelled into the air. #flu www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(26)00232-1
Here's a demo using HLAfreq to predict autoimmune disease rates from HLA allele frequencies 🧪🖥️🧬 towardsdatascience.com/estimating-disease-rates-without-diagnosis/ #hlafreq
DAWells
#philbio
DAWells
A platform called MIST enables quantification and genotyping of infectious influenza
in expelled respiratory particles, revealing diverse, individual-specific viral loads
and aerosolized variants that...
This is super interesting - I never thought about whether you could vaccinate animals without an adaptive immune system 🧪
Wells et al., (2026). HLAfreq: Download and combine HLA allele frequency data. Journal of Open Source Software, 11(121), 10122, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.10122
Initial genomes from May 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, reveal a new spillover event Context On 15 May 2026, the Ministry of Public Health, ...
virological.org
Rajarshi Sanyal
Our new paper doi.org/10.1098/rspb... on long-term genetic threats to small populations finds that "mutational meltdown" (bad mutations fixing) is less of a problem than "mutational drought" (too few good new mutations) @wmawass.bsky.social @uliseshmc.bsky.social @jeremyjberg.bsky.social 1/5
Hannah Thomasy
Abstract. Habitat loss contributes to extinction risk in multiple ways. Genetically, small populations can face an ‘extinction vortex’—a positive feedback
