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Heng Li

@lh3lh3.bsky.social
1.3K followers 120 following 76 posts

Associate Professor DFCI & HMS

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Reposted by Heng Li
jakobheinz.bsky.social @jakobheinz.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I’m excited to share our new preprint introducing HipHap, a tool for assigning long reads to haplotype-resolved diploid reference assemblies! With Max Marin, Matthew Meyerson, and @lh3lh3.bsky.social Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 1/6
biorxiv.org
HipHap: Haplotype Assignment and Confidence Scoring for Diploid Reference Genomes
Diploid genome assemblies are now routinely available, but most read aligners were designed for haploid references, which have long been the gold standard. When reads are aligned to a diploid assembly...
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Single-page, interactive overlap assembler for teaching purposes: lh3.github.io/teach-demo/o... (vibe coded)
lh3.github.io
Overlap Graph Assembly Demo
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
minibwa v0.5+0.6: * fixed an issue in PE mapQ (inherited from bwa-mem) * more conservative PE mapQ (learned from dragmap) * HG002 var calling: FP down but FN up * memory-mapped index loading * user-defined insert size distribution * APIs working for BS-seq github.com/lh3/minibwa/...
github.com
Releases · lh3/minibwa
Successor of bwa-mem for short-read alignment. Contribute to lh3/minibwa development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Reposted by Heng Li
Luca Pinello @lucapinello.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
1/ I'm excited to share that we're launching NECB 2026, the inaugural New England Computational Biology Symposium. Oct 1-2 at Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge. Two days of keynotes,talks, and posters to bring our community together across institutions.Space is limited. newenglandcompbio.org
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Reposted by Heng Li
Katharina Hoff @katharinahoff.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Tiberius predicts genes in eukaryotic genomes via our web service bioinf.uni-greifswald.de/tiberius/ #genomeannotation #geneprediction #eukaryotes
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bioRxiv Genomics @biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
HPRC2: A human pangenome reference with near-complete coverage of common genetic variation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Reposted by Heng Li
Benjamin Schuster-Böckler @dagams.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
BTW: while we were trying to optimise IO from bam/cram in our rust-based methylation/variant calling tool "rastair", we ended up re-implementing htslib with a focus on better pileup performance: docs.rs/seqair/lates... It seems to make a big speed difference for us, would love to get feedback
docs.rs
seqair - Rust
Pure-Rust BAM/SAM/CRAM/FASTA reader, pileup engine, and VCF/BCF writer.
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
minibwa-0.4 released with minor improvement and a few fixes to typos. Also a new blog post on "minibwa is the new bwa-mem": lh3.github.io/2026/07/04/m...
lh3.github.io
Minibwa is the new bwa-mem
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Reposted by Heng Li
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Just added a couple more job apps (thanks Rachel and Arun!) but if you've gotten a job in industry, academia (R1, PUI, whatever!) in the last 5 years or so, please consider submitting your job app materials to help other folks! github.com/RILAB/statem...
github.com
GitHub - RILAB/statements: Successful Job Applications and Grants
Successful Job Applications and Grants. Contribute to RILAB/statements development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Reposted by Heng Li
Andrew Carroll @acarroll.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
How good is MiniBWA, the successor to BWA? To test it, I ran MiniBWA on sequencing from 76 different species, comparing mapping speed, rate and accuracy with BWA MEM. In short, it's really good. If you map short reads, it's well worth your time. andrewcarroll.github.io/2026/06/30/t...
andrewcarroll.github.io
The Best of Both Worlds - Assessing MiniBWA
Recently, Heng Li released MiniBWA (GitHub) alongside a paper by Heng Li and Nils Homer describing the method (paper). MiniBWA builds on the approaches in Minimap2 (also by Heng Li), but falls back on...
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Reposted by Heng Li
Fulcrum Genomics @fulcrumgenomics.com · 30/06/2026
New on the Fulcrum blog: minibwa, a faster mapper from @lh3lh3.bsky.social and our @nilshomer.com Its speed is great, yes, but more interesting is the decision to revisit BWA-MEM as infrastructure – keep what still works, change what limits performance, then test downstream impact. shorturl.at/xxqeI
blog.fulcrumgenomics.com
Minibwa: alignment is never solved
Heng Li and Nils Homer revisit BWA-MEM with a faster mapper for short reads, accurate long reads, and bisulfite sequencing data.
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
minibwa v0.3 released with a few minor bug fixes and two missing bwa-mem features (XA tag for secondary hits and option -H to inject header lines). Also added the "mem" subcommand to mimic "bwa mem" CLI to some extent. github.com/lh3/minibwa/...
github.com
Release Minibwa-0.3 (r391) · lh3/minibwa
Notable changes: New feature: added the mem subcommand to mimic the bwa-mem command-line interface (CLI). Most input/output options and commonly used options are retained; unsupported or incompat...
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Reposted by Heng Li
Genetics Society UK @gensocuk.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Congratulations to Prof Richard Durbin, winner of the 2026 Genetics Society Medal! His pioneering work in computational genomics has transformed how we analyse and understand genome sequences.
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
minibwa-0.2 released with a few minor bug fixes (please keep bug reports coming). No algorithm changes. Minibwa is also available via bioconda thanks to Thanh Lee. github.com/lh3/minibwa/...
github.com
Release Minibwa-0.2 (r370) · lh3/minibwa
This release fixed several minor bugs: Bugfix: FASTA comments not parsed correctly during indexing (#22). It is recommended to reindex the reference genome with the new release. Bugfix: double ...
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357
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Travis Wheeler @wheelerlab.org · 31/05/2026
Introducing nail - a Rust implementation of profile HMM sequence alignment for proteins. Near-HMMER sensitivity, but a lot faster: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... github.com/TravisWheele...
biorxiv.org
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Reposted by Heng Li
Jim Shaw @jimshaw.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Our method, savont, for generating amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) for long-read amplicons is now on bioRxiv. Work with @lh3lh3.bsky.social and help from @mkddueholm.bsky.social and team (Marie Riisgaard-Jensen, @kirk3gaard.bsky.social, Kasper Skytte Andersen) github.com/bluenote-157... 1/6
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Jeremy Wang developed rammap, a minimap2 rewrite in Rust. It achieves comparable or better performance than minimap2 and produces identical output to minimap2. During rewrite, Jeremy found two long-existing bugs in minimap2 which are fixed in v2.31. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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bioRxiv Bioinfo @biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Sensitive long-read amplicon sequence variant recovery with savont www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Jim Shaw @jimshaw.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Excited to speak at ASM Microbe 2026 in the Oxford Nanopore session about new tools for long-read metagenomics + 16S sequencing. If you're attending ASM Microbe June 4-7 in D.C. and want to chat, let me know!
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elizabethginexi.bsky.social @elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...
elizabethginexi.substack.com
Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule
Russell Vought is going destroy American Science
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Reposted by Heng Li
Molly Schumer @mollyschumer.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Please share widely! We will imminently be posting a technician position in our lab group since @rheasood.bsky.social is off to grad school 🙌! If you know of anyone excited about molecular biology, evolution, and functional genomics please have them reach out (schumer at stanford). Start date ~June
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Scott V. Edwards @scottvedwards.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Ver excited to share my just-published Darwin Review with @lh3lh3.bsky.social on population-scale long-read sequencing! royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Population-scale long-read DNA sequencing: peering under the hood of the new evolutionary genomics
Abstract. Population-scale long-read DNA sequencing (PLRS) is rapidly reshaping our understanding of genomic variation in humans and non-model species. In
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Blog post on "The AI Rewrite Dilemma": lh3.github.io/2026/04/17/t...
lh3.github.io
The AI Rewrite Dilemma
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Nils Homer @nilshomer.com · 31/03/2026
If you use fgbio or UMIs at all, you should start using fgumi. Up to 100x faster, and soon 2x faster sort than samtools, it’s been a labor of love and something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.
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Reposted by Heng Li
Tim Fennell @tfenne.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
If you use our fgbio UMI tooling today, you owe it to yourself to check out fgumi! Massively faster re-write into Rust by @nilshomer.com with 100% reproduction of the fgbio outputs!
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
LongcallR for competitive SNP calling and haplotype phasing, and simplified allele-specific analysis with long RNA-seq reads. Found ~100 junctions affected by SNPs per sample with most junctions novel. Developed by Neng Huang. Published in @natmethods.nature.com. Read at rdcu.be/faKhL
rdcu.be
SNP calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific analysis with long RNA-seq reads
Nature Methods - In this study, long-read RNA sequencing achieves accurate single-nucleotide polymorphism calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific expression analysis.
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Reposted by Heng Li
Jim Shaw @jimshaw.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Myloasm, our long-read metagenome assembler, is now published! w/ @mgmarin.bsky.social and @lh3lh3.bsky.social Very rewarding after > a year of development and countless hours thinking about assembly. Thanks to beta testers, Li lab, and reviewers who gave very helpful feedback. rdcu.be/famFj
rdcu.be
High-resolution metagenome assembly for modern long reads with myloasm
Nature Biotechnology - A long-read metagenome assembly method recovers circular and complete genomes better than existing tools.
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Nature Biotechnology @natbiotech.nature.com · 27/03/2026
High-resolution metagenome assembly for modern long reads with myloasm - @lh3lh3.bsky.social @jimshaw.bsky.social @danafarber.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social go.nature.com/3PBEwvR
go.nature.com
High-resolution metagenome assembly for modern long reads with myloasm - Nature Biotechnology
A long-read metagenome assembly method recovers circular and complete genomes better than existing tools.
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Jim Shaw @jimshaw.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
_720 Gbp_ marine nanopore metagenome -> 328 circular prokaryotic contigs: using myloasm! Insane work by Lui and Nielsen. Also shows how modern long read assemblies can disentangle coexisting strains and reveal ecological insights.
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Long reads carry multiple small vars and SVs and their phasing. LongcallD is the only caller that tightly integrates germline/mosaic small/structural vars/MEIs and their phasing in a single C program. One command line to get competitive small variant calls and better SVs. Led by Yan Gao.
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Andre Kahles @akkah21.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
🚀 Hiring a Postdoc in Computational Genomics @ ETH Zurich Join the RADIANT-Dx project—a pioneering effort with UZH & University Hospital Zurich (with Ashley Rooney & Petra Dittrich)—to develop next-gen diagnostics using long-read sequencing & real-time analysis. 👉 www.jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...
jobs.ethz.ch
Postdoctoral Researcher - Bioinformatics
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Kristoffer Sahlin @ksahlin.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗵𝗗 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 / 𝗔𝗹𝗴𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 I am currently recruiting for both: 🔹 Postdoc position su.varbi.com/what:job/job... 🔹 PhD position su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Please share with anyone who might be interested!
su.varbi.com
Postdoktor i Beräkningsbiologi
Matematiska institutionen består av cirka 120 forskare, lärare och administrativ personal och är organiserad i tre huvudsakliga avdelningar: Matematik, Matematisk statistik och Beräkningsmatematik
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Travis Wheeler @wheelerlab.org · 02/03/2026
🖥️ 🧬 ⚛️ 🔬 Plz spread the word. 2-week computational biology workshop in Singapore. No registration fee or expenses for US citizens. Protein annotation, function, structural modeling, and simulation. ~35 attendees. Lectures and hands-on tutorials with intensive instructor interaction. compbioasia.net
compbioasia.net
Compbio Asia
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jakobheinz.bsky.social @jakobheinz.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Our paper on foldback artifacts in long-read sequencing is now published in BMC Genomics! We introduce Breakinator to flag foldback and chimeric artifacts across library types, sequencers, and chemistries. Paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1... With Matthew Meyerson and @lh3lh3.bsky.social
link.springer.com
Detecting foldback artifacts in long-reads - BMC Genomics
Long-read sequencing data is useful for detecting large and complex structural variations; however, technical artifacts can lead to false structural variant calls. In our analyses, we became aware of ...
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Pacific Biosciences Sells Short-Read Sequencing Assets to Illumina for $48.1M www.pacb.com/press_releas...
pacb.com
PacBio Completes Sale of Short-Read Sequencing Assets - PacBio
MENLO PARK, Calif., Feb. 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — PacBio (NASDAQ: PACB), a leading developer of high-quality, highly accurate sequencing solutions, today announced the completion of the sale of sel...
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Jim Shaw @jimshaw.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Announcing a new tool for "denoising" long-read amplicon sequences: savont. Savont enables amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) directly from nanopore (or HiFi) long reads. Tested on 16S nanopore amplicons -- seems to work okay. 1/4 github.com/bluenote-157...
github.com
GitHub - bluenote-1577/savont: Amplicon sequencing variants from 16s ONT R10.4 / HiFi long reads
Amplicon sequencing variants from 16s ONT R10.4 / HiFi long reads - bluenote-1577/savont
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
I am looking for a postdoc to develop high-performance algorithms in computational genomics. Email or DM me if interested. For more information, see hlilab.github.io/vacancies. RTs appreciated!
hlilab.github.io
HLi Lab - Vacancies
Openings
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Now published in Algorithms for Molecular Biology: link.springer.com/article/10.1.... Key message: a tiny CNN model with 7k parameters can capture main splice signals across vertebrates+insect and halves the minimap2 & miniprot junction error rate. I always use this new feature now.
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Now published in gigascience: academic.oup.com/gigascience/.... Key messages: SVs are highly enriched in low-complexity/tandem-repeat regions and are harder to call. They behave differently from transposon insertions. Always stratify if you study SVs.
academic.oup.com
Validate User
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
To those who have open data at AWS cloud: you can use the S3 Bucket Browser to list files in your buckets. You can either 1) put the bucket name at lh3.github.io/s3bb/, 2) or copy this index.html github.com/lh3/s3bb/blo... to the root of a bucket. Generated by gemini.
lh3.github.io
S3 Bucket Browser
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Thanks to the AWS Open Data program, this dataset along some derived data is also openly accessible via @AWSCloud at openhgl.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.html
openhgl.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
S3 Bucket Browser
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Peter Sudmant @psudmant.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
The registration deadline is fast approaching for probgen 2026! Abstracts due by January 15, registration by January 31 probgen2026.github.io
probgen2026.github.io
Home - ProbGen 2026
Your Site Description
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Mile Sikic @msikic.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
I’m recruiting a postdoc to work on algorithms for cancer genome reconstruction. We have access to a rich set of tumour samples sequenced across multiple technologies. If interested, feel free to DM. Please share.
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
579 high-quality human genomes from @humanpangenome.bsky.social, Arab Pangenome and individual papers (CHM13, CN1, KSA001, I002C, YAO and KOREF1). Sequences available in the AGC format (3.7GB) and FM-index in the ropebwt3 format (20.3GB). For details, see github.com/lh3/human-asm
github.com
GitHub - lh3/human-asm: A collection of high-quality human genomes
A collection of high-quality human genomes. Contribute to lh3/human-asm development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Rafael Irizarry @rafalab.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
📢 We are taking applications for our Postdoctoral Fellows Program at Harvard/DFCI! 🔹Join a research group in our department 🔹Co-mentoring opportunities with 2+ faculty 🔹Collaborate with investigators beyond our department 🔹Salary starts at $75K Apply here: t.co/B7SLZzQFKu
t.co
https://ds.dfci.harvard.edu/postdocs/
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
Do you know ~60% of human SVs fall in ~1% of GRCh38? See our new preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.23057 and the companion blog post on how we started this project and longdust: lh3.github.io/2025/09/29/o.... Work with Alvin Qin
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James Bonfield @jbonfield.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Now preprinted at arxiv.org/abs/2509.07357
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