iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

baltic v1.0.0 is live! Get it via pip or clone from Github repo. Now with documentation (baltic.readthedocs.io) & a gallery of tutorials & examples (phylo-baltic.github.io/baltic-gallery, still WIP). Huge thanks to @barney-potter.bsky.social for all the initiative & help along the way. #ViroSky

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Barney Potter & I are putting the finishing touches to the latest release of baltic set for Sep 22. If you're a current baltic user the refactored API will break things. The docs will help you navigate the new API: baltic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/in.... Preprint to follow soon. #ViroSky #EvoSky

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Might be useful if you're teaching antigenic drift this semester! Using @trvrb.bsky.social's modified Antigen simulator (github.com/evogytis/ant...) I made an animation showing how host immunity selects for virus antigenic escape. Available on Youtube too: youtu.be/hKE5us9nayI?... #ViroSky #EvoSky

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I think I made it, y'all 🥲 A thank you gift from my student Aistė Židonytė (who's looking for a PhD in public health related fields!) featuring Changua, our trash goblin of a dog.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Please share! My lab has an open fully-funded PhD position at Vilnius University's Life Sciences Center in Lithuania. The PhD project will involve identifying missing orthomyxovirus segments from public sequence data. Applicants must hold an MSc by June & have bioinformatics experience. 1/2

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

This isn't in international media yet but Lithuania is in crisis. The ruling coalition is trying to seize control of our public broadcaster LRT using expedited parliamentary procedures. European & Venice Commissions are aware & we've been protesting for the last two weeks. Things are looking grim.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

EMBO Young Scientists Forum 2025 in Vilnius wrapped up today. Huge thanks to fellow organisers, volunteer teams, @itaiyanai.bsky.social for a wonderful Night Science workshop & all speakers & attendees. Here's fellow organiser Stephen Jones taking YSF attendee entertainment to the next level.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Indrė, as a data sciences MSc, has done an excellent job at collating sequence & predictor data for a BEAST GLM, even teaching me a few things along the way. Our results implicate (weakly) cattle trade & short distance (shared land border and intra-continental) migrations in moving flu D around. 2/6

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

My MSc student Indrė Blagnytė has a #preprint up on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social on influenza D virus: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Flu D was discovered back in 2011, mostly circulating in cattle. Despite lots of research, a comprehensive analysis of its phylogeography had been missing. 1/6

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Last week we had a 3-day lab retreat at Vilnius University's base in Puvočiai with Lander de Coninck & @ingrida.bsky.social joining us as visitors. These retreats keep getting better & more productive thanks to the students & especially fellow PI @mgabrielaite.bsky.social. I'm super proud!

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

This is quite late but our lab has a preprint out about a SARS-CoV-2 situation we had in mink in Lithuania back in 2021. It's a doozy with re-emergence of extinct lineages, a country-wide test of all mink farms in Lithuania & some interesting dynamics in mink. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/5🧵

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

The Vilnius University team (myself & PhD student @emremertasar.bsky.social) are on our way to #RdRpSummit2025 & #ViBioM2025 in Lisbon. Looking forward to sharing some of my ramblings & seeing folks! Come find us if you have Wuhan mosquito virus 6 or Culex mosquito virus 4 sequences 🙂

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

We're looking for a PhD student to join us at Vilnius University in Lithuania. We work on RNA virus evolution computationally but we'd like to generate more mosquito RNA virus sequence data. Official ad: www.gmc.vu.lt/en/doctoral-.... Please share & continue reading if interested.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Vilnius University students are awesome - last week they wrapped up The COINS, a student-organised conference for which they got both Nobel & IgNobel prize winners as speakers. Very proud of everyone & particularly my student Aistė Židonytė who was the executive project manager for the conference.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

My PhD student Emre Mert Asar stumbled upon something interesting. Apparently there's a chuvirus (group of bizarre (-)ssRNA viruses discovered 10 years ago with supposedly highly variable genome organisations) found in ticks in China that causes human disease: www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1...

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

Heading back after a wonderful #VGEB24. Couldn't be happier having seen my favourite people again & being able to give my lab members an opportunity to see cutting edge science firsthand. Hope I can return in 2 years to deliver on my exquisite data vis promise. The last night was quite the blur!

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

Very excited to be travelling to #VGEB24! I gave an overhyped talk at the 1st VGE (thanks, Ebola animation) then missed 3 meetings & now I'm back to talk (Thu 7 Nov) about Wuhan mosquito virus 6 (WuMV-6). Members of my lab (Aistė Židonytė & Martynas Smičius) will also present posters. Come see us!

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 13/05/2024

There's Wuhan mosquito virus 6 (WuMV-6) news from our lab! We got some sequences from Lithuanian mosquitoes & it looks like WuMV-6 here is related to the divergent lineage from Sweden which is interesting in the context of some hypotheses we have about this virus. 1/2 #VirEvol #EvolSky #MicroSky

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

Very proud to share my very first book written together with Alli Black! It covers the principles & considerations of genomic epidemiology as well as real-world examples. We hope it'll prove a useful teaching resource for the field. Psst... the free version lives here: alliblk.github.io/genepi-book/

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

Meanwhile, greetings from my holiday in Colombia! It's not even been a week and we've already had plenty of adventures with even more adventures coming up 🌎🚙

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

Following Rob Gifford's seminar we went to one of Vilnius' secret gems - San Diego, the bar with the best tacos in town, if not country. It was also a great excuse for my slowly expanding lab to get together and hang out in a less formal environment which I appreciated a lot.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

I'd like to offer a late but sincere thanks to Rob Gifford, one of the pioneers of paleovirology, who visited Vilnius University's Life Sciences Center and gave a seminar last week. Thanks for the talk and the discussions. I hope to see you on Bluesky in the near future!

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 19/02/2024

We finish with a forecast of orthomyxovirus diversity discovery. We know RNA virus diversity must be finite but can we detect decreasing novelty of newly discovered orthomyxoviruses? The answer looks to be yes but many very novel-looking members also seem to be waiting for discovery.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 19/02/2024

WuMV-6 belongs to a wider group of orthomyxoviruses we've found to have a genome comprised of 8 segments (nearest relatives have 7) which is mosquito-associated and which seems to have surface proteins (gp64) that exhibit some funky evolution (also vertebrate infecting?).

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 19/02/2024

We observe very fast WuMV-6 migration rates (e.g. covering the perimeter of the Pacific Ocean in the last ~20 years) and higher rates of non-synonymous evolution in its surface protein. This and some other evidence point to a vertebrate playing a role in its transmission cycle!

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 19/02/2024

The paper mostly focuses on Wuhan mosquito virus 6 (WuMV-6), an orthomyxovirus ((-)ssRNA) that was discovered in 2013 and has been cropping up *very* often in Culex mosquito transcriptomes since from all around the world. It's so common we can run very sophisticated phylogenetic models on it.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 05/12/2023

It's been such a fun & productive visit to my alma mater University of Edinburgh this last week. Ashworth remains one of the nicest & most communal science departments I've ever seen. Almost felt like I had never left.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Today my BSc student Miglė Kazlauskaitė (R) & colleague Miglė Tomkuvienė (L) detected Wuhan mosquito virus 6 in Lithuania for the first time (B) in mosquitoes collected by colleague Rasa Bernotienė & her students. I'm so proud, grateful & relieved. Take that, grant reviewers who doubted it's here.

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 05/10/2023

Excited to be back in Warsaw and even more excited to spend the next few days at the EMBO YIN meeting on ecology and evolutionary biology of microbes in Chęciny organised by Anna Karnkowska, Rafał Mostowy & Kasia Piwosz. I've missed meetings like this so much. Thanks, EMBO!

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Gytis Dudas @evogytis.bsky.social · 29/09/2023

Love seeing thousands of taxpayer galactic credits being put to good use in science publishing. I used to tell a story about a journal where copy editors changed numbers to references and vice versa. Most recently I had all the names in the acknowledgments section turned to initials.

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