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Austin Richardson

@agdr.org

Metagenomics, Software Engineering

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18.08.2023
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Latest posts by Austin Richardson @agdr.org

Release Heading into the sunset Β· tseemann/prokka The future This is probably the last release of Prokka. I won't be making any code changes except bug fixes. I will update the databases occasionally. I strongly recommend you use Bakta by @oschwen...

πŸ’Ύ Prokka 1.15.6 is released!

This is the last major release of Prokka. But don't be sad, because @oschwengers.bsky.social already has an excellent replacement called Bakta you can migrate to.
#bioinformatics #microbiology #genomics

github.com/tseemann/pro...

15.12.2025 21:09 πŸ‘ 117 πŸ” 60 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 2
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🚨New preprint out!
We present a foundational genomic resource of human gut microbiome viruses. It delivers high-quality, deeply curated data spanning taxonomy, predicted hosts, structures, and functions, providing a reference for gut virome research. (1/8)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

06.11.2025 17:26 πŸ‘ 91 πŸ” 47 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 2
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When you buy a cutting board from bioinformaticians

26.10.2025 22:56 πŸ‘ 55 πŸ” 7 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 0

gut fauna

31.03.2025 09:48 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Tech snow day

20.10.2025 16:00 πŸ‘ 57 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
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SimpleFold and the Future of Protein Folding A Generative Shift in Protein Folding

Apple's approach to protein structure is great for accessibility - & potentially biological realism - reasons.

Eg, prediction could be achieved w/ smaller compute & the generative nature of prediction allows for multiple conformations

A summary here: genomely.substack.com/p/simplefold...

25.09.2025 19:20 πŸ‘ 16 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

If you're wondering why we're hosting the pre-print via dropbox, its because arXiv (and bioRxiv) did not accept it (because it is a review). Its a bit disconcerting, because a review is precisely the type of paper that would benefit a lot from pre-publication dissemination and feedback.

25.09.2025 13:25 πŸ‘ 14 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 9 πŸ“Œ 0

Closed my eyes for a sec and summoned another earthquake

23.09.2025 01:23 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

they should invent a type of volatile memory that gets heavier the more data it contains

15.09.2025 22:29 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Blogged about how zstd --long fills the gap between fast and slow-but-high-ratio genome compression methods log.bede.im/2025/09/12/z...

12.09.2025 15:07 πŸ‘ 18 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 3
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BLAST+ Release Notes Note: If buildingΒ BLAST+ from source code, the Zlib, Zstandard and Bzip2 libraries will be needed.

NCBI BLAST can now output a proper CSV with headers πŸ‘πŸŽ‰: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK131...

31.08.2025 17:57 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

you can just pour milk over trail mix and eat it like cereal

25.08.2025 17:54 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."

18.08.2025 20:00 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
With 3 threads, the middle thread processes the reads starting in the middle third of the fasta file.

With 3 threads, the middle thread processes the reads starting in the middle third of the fasta file.

Little writeup on the speed of fasta parsers, at last.

Basically: both needletail and paraseq are process input linearly, and thus have a limit around 4 GB/s.

By giving each thread its own slice of the input file, we're limited by RAM bandwidth instead :)

curiouscoding.nl/posts/fasta-...

06.08.2025 17:42 πŸ‘ 17 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Red banner from the top of PubMed, saying "Service Alert: Planned Maintenance beginning July 25th. Most services will be unavailable for 24+ hours starting 9pm EDT. Learn more about the maintenance."

Red banner from the top of PubMed, saying "Service Alert: Planned Maintenance beginning July 25th. Most services will be unavailable for 24+ hours starting 9pm EDT. Learn more about the maintenance."

I do not enjoy that we now live in a world where seeing this banner at the top of PubMed makes me nervous.

23.07.2025 14:37 πŸ‘ 50 πŸ” 11 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

TIL the EBV genome is *included in the hg38 assembly* so that EBV reads are not erroneously mapped elsewhere to the human genome. That's certainly .... an interesting solution ... 🀯

But it enabled this extremely cool work:

22.07.2025 22:30 πŸ‘ 21 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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I know genomes. Don't delete your DNA Too many people are panicking about 23andMe.

This is a bad take
stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/i-know-gen...

Saying that DNA data is like your browsing data and can can therefore be leaked is a false equivalence. Thing A is on fire so it's fine for thing B to be on fire, too-style argumentation.

21.07.2025 23:51 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Q: what do viruses and potatoes have in common?
A: both are "acellular root"

30.06.2025 18:35 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Handy to keep up with the ICTV's changes to virus taxonomy and species names:
taxonomy.onecodex.com/taxon/694009...
vs:
taxonomy.onecodex.com/taxon/694009...
or
taxonomy.onecodex.com/taxon/11676/...
vs
taxonomy.onecodex.com/taxon/11676/...

23.06.2025 17:02 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Are you attending #ASMicrobe this is week? Stop by my talk on Friday morning (10AM) and say hello! πŸ‘‹ if you can’t make it and want to meet up - just drop me a DM!

I love this meeting and connecting with so many friends and colleagues over the years has made it really a special meeting.

19.06.2025 20:11 πŸ‘ 13 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1
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🌳 Taxonomy Time Machine now supports batch lookups! Quickly resolve lists of names/TaxIDs to their current NCBI taxonomy β†’ taxonomy.onecodex.com/bulk-resolver

16.06.2025 18:02 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Taxonomy Time Machine Explore and compare the history of the NCBI Taxonomy Database. Instantly browse, search, and reconstruct taxonomic lineages at any point in time. Open source, web-based, and API-accessible.

πŸš€ Pushed some updates to taxonomy.onecodex.com

- Example queries to help you get started
- Summary section for easier interpretation
- Perf. improvements

24.05.2025 21:38 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Discover the ATCC Genome Portal | ATCCCart

🧡 The ATCC Genome Portal hit 5,500 authenticated microbial genomes (>2,600 species)! πŸŽ‰πŸ₯³ We've sequenced, assembled, annotated 4,538 bacteria, 479 viruses, 479 fungi, and 4 protists! All NGS in-house @ ATCC under ISO, and >90% on BOTH @nanoporetech.com and #Illumina 😎 www.atcc.org/applications...

02.04.2025 19:23 πŸ‘ 32 πŸ” 12 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 2

Something happened to my $PATH and now nothing works

Trisolarans: β€œthe Sophons have succeeded in disrupting science”

02.04.2025 20:09 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Bad day for VCF files

24.03.2025 16:24 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It's clearly a DNS issue, but overall, the NCBI is the least reliable I've ever experienced in my career. And I'm in this long enough to remember the Entrez API giving you only part of the file every 50-100th time.

02.03.2025 13:45 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

using github copilot to fail at github workflows aka boiling the ocean

15.02.2025 01:43 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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I call it the London Smaug (Tension Tamer + espresso latte)

11.02.2025 20:16 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Mac OS9 for Bioinformatics in SNU
Mac OS9 for Bioinformatics in SNU YouTube video by κ°ˆλ‘œμ•„ Galois

Join us at SNU and gain access to leading-edge hardware: m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztth...

11.02.2025 07:41 πŸ‘ 33 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 1

How many arginines are in mStrawberry?

05.02.2025 21:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0