Thanks to @kgandersen.bsky.social for taking this on - for years I was paying for virological.org out of my own pocket (primarily because I couldn't work out how to get it funded).

Finally we speculate as to whether this phenomenon of persistence and latency might be an adaptive mechanism of the virus to maintain itself in a structured and geographically diverse reservoir.

Doing so changes our understanding of where the root of the EBOV tree lies, the amount of time that underlies the current distribution and diversity of the virus. This hopefully help to provide insight into the nature and composition of this thus-far elusive reservoir.

We model this process of going into and out of latency and see if it can explain the variation in the molecular clock observed in the phylogenetic tree that subtends the human outbreaks.

We ask if a process similar to that observed in humans (persistence and then recrudescence with little or no replication and accumulation of mutations) might also be at work in the reservoir (likely bats).

This paper has been many years in creation, derailed by a pandemic. Lead by JT McCrone, it is a collaboration with @msuchard.bsky.social, @guybaele.bsky.social, @ifeanyiomah.bsky.social , Eddy Kinganda-Lusamaki, Luiz Carvalho, @evogytis.bsky.social, and Placide Mbala-Kingebeni

I would imagine that EIT plans to offer this as a service to public health labs globally a bit like Microsoft has got their claws into just about every institution. So this is probably going to be Teams but for pathogen genomics. With everything that sentence implies.

And as you say, that is before we get to the point where people have to decided whether to upload it all to the next mad billionaire’s weekend project.

The EIT thing keeps banging on about ‘always on’ which kind of misses the point that it is the surveillance network, sample collection, testing infrastructure that needs to be ‘always on’.

Or the UKHSA for just one bit of the UK

Custom in-house pipeline

It is almost a classic reply-guy reply. If this as the other place it would have been instant!

Cue replies saying "Actually Frankenstein was the creator not the recombinant person monster"

Damn, I forgot to put "Never going to give you up" on it. You all clicked it right?

I just registered the domain Pathogenomenick.ai - do you want it?

Wonderful picture. Same nights, exactly the same location, different scale - a zoom in on the orange rectangle -