Ewan Birney
65K posts
Ewan Birney
@ewanbirney
Deputy Director General of EMBL, Director of EMBL-EBI. I have an insatiable love of biology. @[email protected]. I also work with ONT, Dovetail + GeL.
- New SARS_CoV_2 virus strain update. TL;DR - there is something to understand more, and it looks like the virus has tweaked its biology at least on transmissibility; Public health, scientists + surveillance systems are on it.
- Omicron thoughts from dark, Christmas London. TL;DR - Europe+World is facing the Omicron storm and it looks increasingly bad; and, obviously, the virus doesn't care about Christmas. Despite some serious response in the UK, this virus is replicating fast; more action likely needed
- Deep breath, my views on the SARS CoV2 Mutation story in London/South East. It's a fast moving story (at least for phylogeography); I'm a one step-away from experts, aiming here to provide some light.
- This is part right (“we’re on a cusp of further genetic understanding of health etc) and then straightforwardly *wrong* on its implication (“there are inherent differences between groups”) and this pseudoscience twoodle by @GoodwinMJ needs … debunking >>Matt Goodwin says developments in genetic science will make younger generations more conservative as they understand the "inherent differences" between different groups.
00:00 - It does definitely look like a code red on B.1.1.529 (in need of a Greek letter). Time to - red list international travel from Southern Africa, monitor circulating SARS-CoV-2 (isolates, wastewater), drugs and vaccines to SA, biological assays on pseudo virus.
- <sigh>. Another moment reading a paper where an author says "with the difference in outcomes between ethnic groups this shows that there are genetic components to this process". Nope. It does *not*.
- Grant writing advice. Many people get too detailed and assume background knowledge of the reviewer too quickly. Your grant early on needs to answer (in my view) these questions:
- Another freely shared thought: you'd be surprised how far a little bit of UNIX+little bit of Python+little bit of R will take you as an experimental biologist. Really worth learning. Frankly we should teach this at the start of undergraduate everywhere in biology.
- Some perspective on #AlphaFold with the rather eye-popping announcement from @DeepMind and @emblebi (which I am Director of) of all known proteins (~200 million) having an AlphaFold prediction run.
- Dear UK Journalists. I suspect some of you are going to be rightly asked to write up the striking jump in SARS-CoV-2 cases registered today by PHE, and quite rightly. This is the "raw" case plot data. Some notes on this:
- A note for I think journalists about the "377 deaths under 60" being the cost for COVID for the UK. This a bonkers positioning statement and is definitely not something trying to shed light on the extremely nasty problem we have in front of us.
- Replying to @shi_huang5I think I count as “highly qualified geneticist” (phd, well published over 20 years, over 200 papers, >100 cited >100 times, involved in human genome from late 1990s until now, EMBO member, Fellow of Royal Society…) and this is utter rubbish. Real class A intellectual fantasy.
- This is happening in trillions of places in your body right now, providing you with energy. Biology is ... amazing (plus - great animation!)A short clip of the incredible pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (from the Krebs cycle) in action 😮 This is one of the largest known protein complexes. Visit: smart-biology.com/instructors/mo… for more info. 🐙 #enzyme #cycle #animation #biology #complex #academic #material
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