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Xiaowei Jiang

@johnjxw.bsky.social
587 followers 1.5K following 294 posts

Computational and evolutionary biologist, studying virus, microbial and cancer evolution. Views my own.

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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Very useful genomic resources for bat-virus coevolution research. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography - Nature
An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
New toy! github.com/broadinstitu... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
github.com
GitHub - broadinstitute/delphy: Fast, scalable, accurate and accessible Bayesian phylogenetics
Fast, scalable, accurate and accessible Bayesian phylogenetics - broadinstitute/delphy
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
We already have a "world model" there for biology and medicine! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
cell.com
World models for biomedicine
Biological processes continuously adapt in response to intervention. Unlike static predictive models, biomedical world models support action-conditioned simulations for counterfactual reasoning, inter...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Targeting a "hairy" spike is hard! www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Vaccination generates broadly cross-neutralizing antibodies to the HIV Env apex - Nature
A vaccination strategy using heterologous HIV Env trimers covalently coupled to liposomes for multivalent display generates cross-neutralizing HIV serum antibody responses in non-human primates, mimic...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
This may be justified as their hosts are bacteria, but then what's next? Safe viral vectors for gene therapies? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models
Many important biological functions arise not from single genes but from complex interactions encoded by entire genomes. We report the first generative design of complete bacteriophage genomes using g...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Have a look at this one, it is getting better, and can use your local env, three different popular agent harness systems: github.com/aipoch/open-...
github.com
GitHub - aipoch/open-science: Open Science is an open-source, local-first, model-agnostic AI research workbench for scientific discovery.
Open Science is an open-source, local-first, model-agnostic AI research workbench for scientific discovery. - aipoch/open-science
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Fitness flux: more interactive data, too, and Trevor also shows that the adaptation of SARS-COV-2 well follows the expectation of Fisher's fundamental theorem! blab.github.io/fitness-flux/ , also check Meijers et al, but what genetic mechanisms make this prediction challenging now, recombination?
blab.github.io
Fitness flux in SARS-CoV-2 and influenza H3N2
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
A true foundational "virtual-cell" should learn from an "evolutionary tape" that can play the whole spectrum of organismal evolution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain - Nature
Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversificat...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Not sure about the ecological changes of reservoir animals for emerging/re-emerging viral pathogens this year: yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/06/may-...
yaleclimateconnections.org
May 2026 was the world's second-warmest May on record » Yale Climate Connections
Global sea surface temperatures were the second-highest on record for May.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
If I let Fable 5 work on my codebase...cancer, virus, and bacteria...and the key word pathogen...will it get crazy...hmm...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Evolutionary genetics of ageing www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Evolutionary genetics of ageing - Nature Reviews Genetics
Modern humans increasingly live long enough to experience late-life consequences of genetic and molecular systems shaped by natural selection. In this Review, the authors integrate evolutionary geneti...
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
Andrew Rambaut (🐏🎀) @arambaut.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Complete genome of the Hondius outbreak hantavirus (and tree): virological.org/t/complete-s...
virological.org
Complete sequence of Orthohantavirus andesense virus: Swiss resident 2026
Posted on behalf of the Swiss National Reference Center for Emerging Viral Infections, Geneva University Hospitals and the Institute of Medical Virology, University of Zurich (Partner Laboratory Natio...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
BEAST!
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
Ed Hutchinson @socialinfluenza.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
🚨New paper!🚨 Our study showing that H5N1 influenza viruses can remain infectious in unpasteurised milk for, basically, as long as you are likely to encounter that milk has now been published: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
A drawing of a Fresian cow whose markings resemble influenza viruses (image: Ed Hutchinson, 2025)
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Plasmid mutation rates scale with copy number doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
doi.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
How somatic evolution affects health? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
How somatic evolution affects health - Nature Ecology & Evolution
As somatic evolution becomes directly measurable, integrating eco-evolutionary principles with high-resolution molecular data creates opportunities to anticipate and prevent disease.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Paul Ehrlich has died www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/b..., some say the coming misery of my generation might have something to do with him.
reason.com
Population doomster and false prophet of ecological apocalypse Paul Ehrlich has died
Paul Ehrlich, the leading false prophet of inevitable environmental doom and author of the infamous 'The Population Bomb,' has died at age 93.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Riboviruses are cool! A symbiotic origin of the ribosome? academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
academic.oup.com
A symbiotic origin of the ribosome?
Abstract. The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of the multiple unsolved problems, the origin of the translation system (the means b
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Chen Ning “Frank” Yang (1922–2025): Profound proponent of symmetry 'Where there is a bang, there is Yang' www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
Zamin Iqbal @zaminiqbal.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Courtesy of @martibartfast.bsky.social , we have a new release of AllTheBacteria which adds another 322,920 assemblies, covering all ENA (illumina, isolate) prokaryotes to May 2025. allthebacteria.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ov...
allthebacteria.readthedocs.io
Overview — AllTheBacteria documentation
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Finally, got the whole idea, it just took 10+ years to get there. It seems to connect everything since Fisher and Wright, etc. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Fitness flux and ubiquity of adaptive evolution | PNAS
Natural selection favors fitter variants in a population, but actual evolutionary processes may decrease fitness by mutations and genetic drift. Ho...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
A mathematical model from statistical physics can help reveal properties of populations under changing immune selection (changing fitness landscapes/seascapes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
朋友们,马年大吉!
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
So understanding origin of life and RNA viruses converges? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand
The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Such a nice paper, finally got the time to read it. academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...
academic.oup.com
CHAOS AND UNPREDICTABILITY IN EVOLUTION
Abstract. The possibility of complicated dynamic behavior driven by nonlinear feedbacks in dynamical systems has revolutionized science in the latter part
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Interesting paper www.nature.com/articles/s41... it seems to be consistent with recent spillover event(s) discovered in a dairy farm in the northern Netherlands, but would be interesting to see how many of those potentially mammal adaptive mutations in this wave of bird migration?
nature.com
Ecology and environment predict spatially stratified risk of H5 highly pathogenic avian influenza clade 2.3.4.4b in wild birds across Europe - Scientific Reports
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) represents a threat to animal and human health, with the ongoing H5N1 outbreak within the H5 2.3.4.4b clade being one of the largest on record. However, it rem...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Sec and Tat mediated secretion safeguards Mycobacterium tuberculosis membrane homeostasis www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
"HLA micropolymorphisms confine neoantigen conformational adaptability and guide T cell receptor selectivity" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Well, that's almost every postdoc's daily life in Oxford or Cambridge. On the positive side, some of the research directions you pursue can be intellectually satisfactory and beneficial to your career even if they did not make it to one of these journals.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Somatic and germline mutational processes across the tree of life www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...
researchsquare.com
Somatic and germline mutational processes across the tree of life
The characterisation of mutational processes active in somatic and germline cells in vivo has predominantly focused on human cancers, normal tissues and model organisms. Beyond mammals, little is know...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
"...progression to colorectal cancer requires traversing a rugged fitness landscape, whereas subsequent CNA evolution is constrained by negative selection." aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...
aacrjournals.org
Negative Selection Maintains Grossly Altered but Broadly Stable Karyotypes in Metastatic Colorectal Cancer
AbstractAneuploidy is near-ubiquitous in cancer and contributes to tumor biology. However, the temporal evolutionary dynamics that select for aneuploidy remain uncharacterized. We performed longitudin...
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
Thijs Kuiken @thijskuiken.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
This first probable case of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a dairy cow in Europe raises two points. First, it suggests that virus incursion is possible in the Dutch housing system, which differs from that in the southern U.S., where cows were first infectted. www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Bird flu antibodies found in cow in the Netherlands, a first outside of U.S.
Dead cat led to discovery, but officials stress no further spread of H5N1 has been detected
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Will there be convergent evolution in the GP RBD for NPC1 for ongoing and future outbreaks assuming they are from different zoonotic reservoirs? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
cell.com
Molecular characterization of Ebola virus glycoprotein V75A substitution in the 2018–2020 epidemic
An Ebola virus glycoprotein mutant, which emerged early during the 2018–2020 epidemic, enhances viral infectivity through multiple mechanisms and may have contributed to its dominance in the outbreak.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Interesting blog about a Dutch software entrepreneur and his approach to fight his own cancer. centuryofbio.com/p/sid
centuryofbio.com
Going Founder Mode On Cancer
Sid Sijbrandij's extraordinary care journey
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
I guess it wont work well is because many genes and their carriers/genomes evolve in a way determined by non-fixed population genetic parameters, and current data do not cover their changing evolutionary landscapes spanning vast biological complexity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
This is fun: "By the year 2000, the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. —Ehrlich (1968)" "Prediction in ecology and evolution" academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...
academic.oup.com
Prediction in ecology and evolution
Abstract. Prediction is frequently asserted to be the sine qua non of science, but prediction means different things to different people in different conte
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Healthcare setting driven evolution: doi.org/10.64898/202...
doi.org
Healthcare Infrastructure Shapes Evolutionary Trade-offs and Geographic Dissemination of Multidrug-Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii
Antimicrobial-resistant pathogens pose an existential threat to modern medicine, yet the evolutionary forces driving their adaptation in healthcare systems remain largely unexplored. We revealed that ...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
Happy New Year with a nice pint of IPA.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
One comment I like is that many of the "working" methods are like "cooking recipes", and you also need diversity for future success in this field. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u-D...
youtube.com
EP20: Yann LeCun
YouTube video by The Information Bottleneck
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Generally bacteria can have large effective population size, and there are less genetic redundancy due to effective selection, so gene copy number can be very useful in certain context for predictive modelling. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
Gene copy-number features generalize better than SNPs for antimicrobial resistance prediction in Staphylococcus aureus - npj Antimicrobials and Resistance
npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - Gene copy-number features generalize better than SNPs for antimicrobial resistance prediction in Staphylococcus aureus
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 20/12/2025
Using LLMs responsibly should be taught from primary schools now.
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
Ben Vezina @bananabenana.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Absolutely stoked to have this published in @plosbiology.org We looked at the metabolism of #Klebsiella pneumoniae 🦠🧫. We not only demonstrated lineage-specific #metabolism, but that lineages can cross-feed and support each other. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... #MicroSky #microbiology 🧬 🧪 💊
journals.plos.org
A metabolic atlas of the Klebsiella pneumoniae species complex reveals lineage-specific metabolism and capacity for intra-species co-operation
Why are there so many co-circulating Klebsiella pneumoniae clones? Using genomics and large-scale metabolic modelling of >7000 isolates, this study identifies structured, clone-specific metabolic spec...
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
OncoDaily @oncodaily.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
A Man From the Roman Empire Diagnosed With Metastatic Cancer 1,700 Years After His Death oncodaily.com/oncolibrary/... #OncoDaily #Oncology #Cancer #Health #Medicine #MedEd #MedOnc #MedNews
oncodaily.com
A Man From the Roman Empire Diagnosed With Metastatic Cancer 1,700 Years After His Death - OncoDaily
A Man From the Roman Empire Diagnosed With Metastatic Cancer 1,700 Years After His Death / cancer, Headlines, OncoDaily, Oncology, Roman Empire,
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
What should we call it? If in the traditional sense evolutionary cell biology context? nathanlapierre731428.substack.com/p/the-real-v...
nathanlapierre731428.substack.com
The Real Value of the Virtual Cell Challenge
Reflecting on its limitations should guide the future of virtual cell research
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · 09/12/2025
Spillover of #influenza A viruses from animals to humans represents a threat to our health. In this Perspective, Silke Stertz @virology.uzh.ch discusses emerging research that suggests some influenza A viruses can enter host cells via MHC-II receptors across species 🧪 #virology
plos.io
A new path to spillover: MHC-II entry of influenza A viruses
Spillover of influenza A viruses from animals to humans represents a threat to our health. This Perspective discusses emerging research that suggests some influenza A viruses can enter host cells via…
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
It feels so so strange, and people are so quiet about this.
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
This is expected, particularly interesting is that AlphaFold or similar methods learn the biases in the PDB database. www.cell.com/structure/ab...
cell.com
Flexibility or uncertainty? A critical assessment of AlphaFold 2 pLDDT
Vander Meersche et al. present a large-scale analysis of the AlphaFold2/AlphaFold3/ESMFold confidence index pLDDT and flexibility metrics derived from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. While genera...
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
The only thing I can say is that somatic evolution is less studied/understood. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
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Reposted by Xiaowei Jiang
Michael Deistler @deismic.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Simulation-based Inference (SBI) brings the power of generative modeling to parameter inference in science and engineering. We have now written a practical guide on how to effectively use these methods across domains 🔭👁️‍🗨️🦞
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Xiaowei Jiang @johnjxw.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
It works as we last tried sequences from an unreleased glycoprotein-host receptor complex, and it predicted a positive interaction score!
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