iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 17/08/2026

“To bee or not to bee” Had so much fun at the poster session this evening, but my voice is all gone 😪 Thanks for everyone who stopped by! #IUSSI26

Photo of me with my right hand raised dramatically and my left hand holding a glass of wine. Two people are standing across from me, listening to me re-enact hamlet (joke).

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 14/08/2026

Excited share our honeybee microbiota-gut-brain axis research at @uissi-social.bsky.social next week. Here’s a sneak preview! Who else is going?

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 12/08/2026

Bees Do So Much 🐝 for the environment!

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Reena Debray @reenadebray.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Postdoc position coadvised by me, @jennytung.bsky.social, and Dr. Mercy Akinyi at the @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social to study microbiome transmission between humans, livestock, and wildlife in the Tana River Region of Kenya. More information and application link here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

eva.mpg.de

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 26/07/2026

Clouds obscured the view of any mountains in Zermatt, but saw lots of good dogs

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 26/07/2026

My mom is visiting me in Switzerland and brought two suitcases with her. One for her stuff and the other packed with my stickers 😄

Bags of various stickers my mom had to schlepp to Switzerland for me.

Stickers laid out on a train table with a map background. Described from left to right, top to bottom.

- GutMichaelBiome intestinal tract
- BDSM: Bacteria Do So Much for your microbiome
- poop (iykyk)
- Greetings from your microbiome remembering to eat your fiber, vintage postcard design
- invasive species
- milf: mother of like to ferment

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Sean Gibbons 🦠💩 @gibbological.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

And here's a second NYU postdoc job ad, where I'm looking for a candidate that is interested in working on the gut-brain axis: apply.interfolio.com/189975 please share 🙏

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Steven Robbins @stevenjrobbins.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Short-read metagenomic sequencing cannot recover genomes from many abundant marine prokaryotes due to high strain heterogeneity and platform-specific GC bias (likely viruses, too), but Nanopore long reads can address this. A results 🧵on our recent paper in @nature.com . bsky.app/profile/stev...

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 10/07/2026

I haven’t been to a lot of scientific conferences, but this one has been one of my favorites I’ve attended as an early career scientist. Definitely recommend attending if you’re a later-stage PhD student or early-stage postdoc and your research intersects with microbial symbiosis.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 05/07/2026

🚨NEW STICKER DROP🚨 Mother I’d Like to Ferment Order yours here: gutmichaelbio.me/products/mil... #Kombucha #Scoby #Sticker

My friend holding a Sticker I designed. The sticker features a cartoon SCOBY with a blonde bob of hair and wearing make up and high heels leaning up against a fermentation jar of kombucha.

Red text above the cartoon says “MILF”. And the red text below says “Mother I’d Like to Ferment”.

Stickers are designed and drawn by me (not AI) and printed by my friends RxSkulls in Portland, OR.

The sticker is printed with the highest quality UV-resistant vinyl. So it’s built to last 💪

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 28/06/2026

Swiss🇨🇭 travel hack: with the 35+C (~95F) heat in Geneva, avoid the expensive saunas and get a public transit day pass for $12 instead. You can sweat with friends & strangers while seeing the city at the same time! Then jump into the river to cool off. Rinse and repeat as much as you want.

Photo from inside the 12 tram line in Geneva Switzerland. The window is dripping with water because of the heat and humidity inside the tram.

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Minor Mobius @minormobius.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

First bit of smolswarm tech. Something called boids. Anyway check out some sliders at mega.mino.mobi/bees

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Sean Gibbons 🦠💩 @gibbological.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

📣 Postdoc opportunity in the StatDivLab (aka the Willis Lab) at the University of Washington. Amy Willis is doing the some of the most exciting/impactful work in microbiome biostats right now. Highly recommend. Job ad below👇 apply.interfolio.com/188571

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 15/06/2026

That’s awesome, thanks! The metabolomics shouldn’t be an issue for us. @joanitoliberti.bsky.social this would be cool to try with Lucie’s and Greg’s data.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 15/06/2026

This is cool! How difficult would it be to setup MICOM for a honeybee gut microbiome? Looks like it’s designed for human systems but I’m guessing a similar approach as these authors could potentially be applied to adapt the software to other host-microbiome systems?

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

@napaaqtuk.bsky.social I realized my BlueSky messages were closed, so they're open now. Also, I think I fixed the issue with the member's only thing, but message me if you run into an issue again. Also pt2, if there's a design you'd like on something else lmk and I can add it.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

Oops! I’ll fix that later today and send you a message once it’s good to go 🫡

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Dr. Kat Napaaqtuk❄️ @napaaqtuk.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I need to restock my #sciart presents for graduating students (undergrads and grad students). Drop a link to your favorite science-themed artists website/etsy/redbubble page below. (microbiology focus is a bonus)

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

Other than stickers, I also sell my designs on direct-to-print clothes or accessories. Here’s a little round up of some of my favorite stickers :)

Screenshot of my sticker that says “I poop therefore I am -socraFeces” with Socrates, sitting upon a toilet

Screenshot of a bumper sticker I made that says I break for microbes with a drawing of a gloved hand holding a Petri dish covered in bacteria colonies

Screenshot of my sticker I made for my PhD dissertation defense of a zebrafish with a gut Microbiome cartoon.

Photo of my one of my more “spicier” but popular stickers that says “BDSM: bacteria do so much (for your microbiome” with a silhouette of a bacteria.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

Each sticker is designed by me (not AI) and printed by my friends in Portland, OR (Sticker Ninja & RXskulls). They’re made on high quality UV-resistant vinyl, so they won’t degrade with time. I also appreciate they pay their workers fair wages and support socially progressive causes

Photo of some my stickers in front of a water fountain.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

Many of my stickers were a limited drop and are currently “out of stock” because I’m doing my postdoc abroad and took my leftover stickers with me. But, I’m working with a friend to help me ship stuff in the US once I restock things (coming soon)!

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

I got started making these stickers during the last year of my PhD as a creative outlet (cough.. procrastinate..). Surprisingly people liked them, and I started a monthly subscription to send new stickers to people each month. GutMichaelBio.me

gutmichaelbio.me

GutMichaelBiome

The official website and shop of GutMichaelBiome. Support science-based art!

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 07/06/2026

Yay I love this thread! So many great sci-artists I can’t wait to follow. I’ll make a shameless plug for my silly niche microbiome-themed stickers :)

Screenshot of one of my first stickers. It says “greetings from your microbiome. Remember to eat your fiber” in the style of a vintage postcard.

GutMichaelBio.me

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 06/06/2026

They don’t name bacteria like they used to :/ Named after the entomologist Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth, of course.

Screenshot of a Wikipedia article.

Text from the screenshot:

Wigglesworthia glossinidia

Wigglesworthia glossinidia is a species of gram-negative bacteria that is a bacterial endosymbiont of the tsetse fly.!"! Because of this relationship, Wigglesworthia has lost a large part of its genome, leaving it with one of the smallest genomes of any living organism, consisting of a single chromosome of 700,000 bp and a plasmid of 5,200. 2! Together with Buchnera aphidicola, Wigglesworthia has been the subject of genetic research into the minimal genome necessary for any living organism.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 11/05/2026

Unfortunately, we can’t make “germ-free” humans without a gut microbiome, but we can use animal models (like bees, mice or fish) to get an indirect look at what might be happening in humans.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 11/05/2026

Not exactly. We are studying whether different inoculations of bee gut microbes influence bee social interactions and behavior. In other words, does a particular bee gut bacteria influence how fast they move, how many times they interact with other bees, etc.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 11/05/2026

Here’s a close up of some of the bees wearing their QR codes.

Screenshot of the black and white video footage. A cluster of honeybees is pictured with tiny QR codes on their backs.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 11/05/2026

My colleagues in the Liberti Lab are running our latest tracking experiment to understand how the gut microbiota influences animal behavior using honeybees. You can watch the live stream here: geneva.tuleu.science/host/palaven... 🐝🧪 @joanitoliberti.bsky.social

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Steven Robbins @stevenjrobbins.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Polling the council of smart people again. What's the current state of the art tool(s) for calling/identifying AMR genes en masse--e.g. in metagenomic plasmids? Please share for reach. :-)

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 29/03/2026

Thanks for the tip about cookiecutter! This project is mostly R-based, but I’ll be using a lot of python soon so it sounds handy. And you nailed where my head was at mid-dissertation writing lol. “This is future Michael’s problem”

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 29/03/2026

Hey! Thanks for the reply. Your questions make sense! Little bit of both. I’m cleaning up an old neglected analysis from my PhD, and wanting to start with a clean slate because things are super messy right now 🙈 hoping to find some structure that can help guide my re-analysis and TBD publication

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 29/03/2026

I asked the question here to engage with my human scientific colleagues, if I wanted to talk to a chatbot I wouldn't have posted this.

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 29/03/2026

Does anyone have examples of their own or others of how to best structure a GitHub repository for a scientific peer-reviewed manuscript? #Science 🧪

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Steven Robbins @stevenjrobbins.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Hey team! What are your favorite metagenomic plasmid identification tools these days? I have a list circa 1-2 years ago, but like to poll the audience every so often. I'd say GeNomad, PlasForest, PlasX, maybe PPR-Meta would be my go-tos. Any others you think should be included? Please share :-)

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Steven Robbins @stevenjrobbins.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Host-asssociated, especially human, metagenomics colleagues! Is there a current best-practice pipeline for removing human (long) reads from a metagenome at this point? We usually just map against the host reference, but are their classifiers that really work well for this?

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Steven Robbins @stevenjrobbins.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Curious, what's the best-practice tool at this point for taxonomically classifying long reads from metagenomes from less well-characterised environments? My impression is that Kraken will give lots of false positives and mis-classify taxa not in its database. Please share around for visibility.

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Possums in your yard? News got you down? Fear not, I have made playlists for the A and B sections of my ongoing Statistical Rethinking course. Click the section of your choice, sit back, and forget the possums and decay of the international order while your brain updates. github.com/rmcelreath/s...

screen shot of lecture playlist links and table of lecture topics

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Sarah Ross @sarahhross.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

If you're doing innovative research about #microbiota and received an MD &/or PhD in last 10 yrs don’t forget to apply for the NOSTER & @science.org Microbiome Prize! Grand Prize: $25K & your essay published in Science Magazine Deadline: Feb 14th Enter: buff.ly/5GKZgUN

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GutMichaelBiome @gutmichaelbio.me · 09/12/2025

So cool! Very nice work 👏

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.

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Steven Robbins @stevenjrobbins.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Hey Team! What do you think are the best free digital notebooks these days. I've used: Evernote--great, but now it's paid TiddlyWiki wasn't bad, but got rid of scrollable code blocks Obsidian--basic, and I don't like not being able to scroll my code blocks like OG Tiddlywiki. Suggestions?

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Sean Gibbons 🦠💩 @gibbological.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

We're at 735 registrants and counting! 🎉🦠 If you haven't registered yet, don't miss out on this exciting (free) symposium on gut microbial metabolites and their impacts on host health. Please share with your networks. 🔗👇 isbscience.org/events/2025-...

isbscience.org

2025 ISB Virtual Microbiome Symposium - Institute for Systems Biology (ISB)

The gut’s microbial ecosystem produces diverse metabolites that actively shape neural, immune, and endocrine function. Join leading researchers on December 12 as they share new discoveries into these ...

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