Alex Crits-Christoph
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acritschristoph.bsky.social
Alex Crits-Christoph
@acritschristoph.bsky.social
Computational microbiologist

I like to post about: microbial genomics, microbial ecology, evolution, micro+plant biotechnology, climate, symbiosis, virology, ag, sci publishing and policy
Both are really freaking cool science

Absolutely loving these "unnatural constructs, genome-like patchworks of genes that have been stitched together into computer files by binning" (those who know, know)
November 10, 2025 at 5:43 PM
well I don't think they are necessarily talking about LLMs for most of the work under the 'AI' moniker, I mean their first move was to acquire ESM for protein folding. (not that there won't be *some* silly LLM stuff, and agree it's super annoying that everything gets lumped as AI)
November 9, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Alex Crits-Christoph
3. It confirms the prediction we made in our 2011 paper that Naomiviridae are far more ubiquitous than the previous metagenomic data would suggest, exactly because of the underrepresentation of phages with modified DNA. cc @bejalab.bsky.social

www.cell.com/current-biol...
A new family of globally distributed lytic roseophages with unusual deoxythymidine to deoxyuridine substitution
Rihtman et al. report the discovery of two novel roseophages containing deoxyuridine (dU) instead of the canonical nucleobase deoxythymidine. Such a substitution results in resistance to a commonly us...
www.cell.com
November 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Alex Crits-Christoph
We found that overall virus-community diversity remains stable, but individual populations show clear diel and depth-linked shifts, with distinct viral archetypes peaking at day or night.

Read the full story on BioRxiv: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Lead author: Alfonso Carrillo
Sub-daily Bermuda Atlantic Time Series virus sampling reveals taxonomy, host, and functional differences at the population, but not community level
Ocean microbes contribute to biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem function, but they do so under top-down pressure imposed by viruses. While viruses are increasingly understood spatially and beginning ...
doi.org
November 5, 2025 at 3:01 PM