iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Abstracts for the Global #eDNA conference at due this Friday! Get yours in, y`all! Early bird registrations also go until the end of July. Come on up!

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I maintain that every Canadian I’ve ever met has been incredibly nice. This one🪿, however, hissed at me from a nest under a bridge I couldn’t even reach, so it has been excluded from the dataset. #birdingwhilecommuting

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

This weekend I witnessed Wilson's Phalarope famous whirlpool feeding!! Spin spin spin! Roadside #birding ftw

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Here at #SFS2026 in Spokane! Looking forward to meeting people and catching up with others! Come on down to my three talks on -eDNA haplotypes -Caddisflies and GMOs -Land-water monitoring with eDNA from the air and water

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

This remains to be the best comic ever made. Just had another one of these moments today. @mrlovenstein.bsky.social

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

The blue throat and the display of the Brandt's cormorants are pretty amazing. #birding

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Hahah it does look comical! But I mean... we don't wanna risk it moving mid sequencing!. These are the conditions most of the time. (It was relatively tame at the time I took this video)

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

We are on! Air 🌬️ Sea spray 💦 Surface 🌊 3000 m deep ⚓ ~1 million DNA molecules/hour sequenced live in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! Shout out to Aden and Rhonda,l who can extract DNA, PCR, and library prep without getting seasick ⛵️ From sample to data in less than 48 hrs. #eDNA #nanopore #UW

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Sea cowboys are at it again! A cast every 4 hours for our Shenanigans. #eDNA #CRESST Cruise

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Sunrise CTD cast!! This one went right inside the Toto caldera, which is an underwater volcano 🌋! We found the volcano did have a plume (meaning it is activelly erupting) - I got to see scientists cheering to a live feed of data when the plume appeared. NASA landing style 🚀👩‍🚀 #Cruise #Volcano

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

We call this trick "we forgot to pack a heatblock and now we have to improvise with a hotplate and sand". It is walnut shell sand. Smells nice.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Our first #CRESST CTD cast is out! A CTD is a rosette sampler full of sensors and water bottles. We can monitor sensors live and trigger the closure of each bottle from aboard as it comes back up through the water column (deep to shalow). We don't have much time, so this cast was only to 200m.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

The Cruise is delayed one more day because the chemicals did not arrive. What do a group of bored scientists do? Come up with a new experiment, of course! #eDNA #rain

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

After a 7 day delay, we are finally on board of the RV Thomas G. Thompson! Getting ready for 14 days of #eDNA data collection and lab work going from #Philippines towards #Guam It is a data deficient area, so I will also be making the first ever pelagic bird surveys of this region.🐦‍⬛🐦 #unqualified

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Getting ready to sequence #eDNA 🧬 while in a rocking boat! #CRESST Cruise

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

They claim there are 2M bats here. They are the pollinators of the Mango plantations in southern Mandanao!

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

This was cool to watch! 🦇🦇🦇🦇🦎 But I have a feeling this monitor Lizard is not trying hard enough lol #hunting #wildlife

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

I was recently humbled by the presence of the type specimen of the first bird ever. The #Archeopteryx is truly a magical thing. This object here defines what a bird🐓 is.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Marion, idk who you are, but you are very funny.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Transport is not one-size-fits-all, because water moves differently across systems! Lakes show short, depth-structured signals. Rivers vary with discharge and particle size. Coastal and open ocean waters can carry eDNA fa, yet still reflect local sources. 🌊📍 #eDNA #AquaticEcology #eDNATransport

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

We reviewed hundreds of papers (over 200!) to identify which factors consistently matter across systems and which ones do not. Some drivers are robust. Others barely show an effect. The field needed a map, so we built one. 📊🧩 #EnvironmentalDNA #Synthesis

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Across all these studies, one thing became obvious: eDNA is not a single thing. It exists in many physical and biological forms, and those forms change how it moves, degrades, and gets detected. That is what we organize with the "eDNA profile" concept. #eDNAProfile

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Packing for the #CRESST research cruise and preparing a manifest was not easy. The neat part is we will have a full #eDNA workflow going in the ship itself - sampling, extraction, PCR, sequencing, and bioinformatics! Our hopes are resting on many ways to tie things down 🪢 and seasickness pills!

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Save the date for a Global #eDNA 🧬 conference! More details to come soon.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

This tiny thing is a fully functional thermocycler for up to 16 tubes.🤯 🧬 We will pair it with a MinION sequencer, an e-Gel and a tiny centrifuge for a field deployable eDNA lab that fits inside a suitcase. #eDNA

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Funny geographic coincidence: drill straight through my hometown in Brazil and you land in the Philippine Sea… where I’ll be on a #UW #CRESST research cruise in a couple of months!! Instead of New Year’s with family, I’ll be as far from home as I could get without being an astronaut 👨‍🚀. #science

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Happy 1000th life bird day!! 🐦 🥳 I went into a nearby hotspot today to get this done... it was a great one, complete with friendly local birders. 56 total sp with 13 lifers at once, which put me at 1004 life birds! Not sure who the exact 1000th bird was, my best guess is the Water Rail!

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

🚀 The @ednacollab.bsky.social just launched the DIYNAFLUOR Microgrant 2025! They’re offering materials + support to build a low-cost DIY fluorometer for eDNA quantification. It can be as effective as Qubit at a % of the cost. Great opportunity for anyone in #eDNA, #DIYBio, #CitizenScience 👇

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

How many Nanopores is too many Nanopores to have running all at once? Well, @AdenIp has four (!!!!) up here at the @ednacollab.bsky.social right now 💢💢💢💢 Why, you ask? "Why not?" - he says Lots of air eDNA data coming out of the oven (literally, these basicalling GPUs warm up the room a lot 🔥🔥🔥)

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

Today the glove box gave me a glove with no thumb and dared me to do science without opposable thumbs. I rejected the challenge 👍

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Toxic trait of bioinfo folks: Everyone insists on building their own pipeline 👨‍💻 Is it (a) distrust, (b) dreams of citations, (c) tryna prove competency— or all? Even if it’s a wrapper on a wrapper, god forbid you just use an established one! I am half guilty as well. xkcd nailed it long ago.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

This spaghetti squash thing is kinda magic y'all. I am not gonna lie. The way it just falls apart in little al-dente spaghetti-like strings is so awesome. I wanna make micro slices of this thing and put it under a microscope like good old plant anatomy classes back in undergrad.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

There are secrets under the dock! Plumose /Cauliflower Anemone (Metridium senile)

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Lots of field work, lab work, and bioinformatics going on here at the @ednacollab.bsky.social #eDNA workshop. What an amazing group of enthusiatic, diverse, and hard working people! 15 instruments built, 84 samples collected and over 60 millions reads sequenced. Lots to harvest from this effort.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Pacific blood star (on a California mussel shell) ⭐️🌊 #seastar

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Got some tidepool fun today. Pisaster ochraceus and its many feet!

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

I now have the perfect video for the intro slide on #eDNA presentations where I say "things shed DNA as they swim around". #polychaetes #epitoke

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Shrimp night at the lamp! 🦐🦐🦐Very different from pre-Tsunami.🌊 We suspect it may have caused some interesting changes that triggered the shrimp to spawn. Good thing we had a time series running before the tsunami 😈. That paper just got a bit more interesting

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Behold Aequorea victoria, best known for its fluorescent protein: GFP!🟢 Awesome to see this thing, specially in the very place GFP was first discovered! This very jellyfish individual is probably related to those who had their GFP isolated at FHL, which ultimately led to the 2008 Nobel prize.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

The ocean is a terrifying yet fascinating place. That eDNA sample will get swamped by #polychaete sperm.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

If this made any sound, what would it sound like?

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

We are here at Friday Harbor Labs getting ready to receive 14 students from 12 countries for the @ednacollab.bsky.social eDNA 🧬workshop! It will be a fun but intense 3 weeks of eDNAing around and learning from a very diverse group. #eDNA #FHL #UW

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

I went to my local coin store and got $9,50 of collection supplies. I was handed this + a wink 😉 as change. Straight into the flip it went. As a visa holder in the land of the free🗽, I am advised against posting political opinions. But I am allowed to post #coins minted by the US itself, I think.

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Pedro Brandão-Dias F Pinto @pedrobd.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Sometimes we make friends when birding. 🦆 I suspect someone is feeding these ducks, or they were seeking some protection from the nearby bald eagle🦅

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