Arun Das
arun-das.bsky.social
Arun Das
@arun-das.bsky.social
Postdoc at @genomescience.bsky.social‬. Scientist working in computer science and genomics. More info: arundas.org .

PhD from Schatz Lab @ JHU. Previously: CS @ Brown. He/His/Him. #YNWA 🍉
Pinned
Our pre-print on investigating variation in South Asian genomes is now out!

Thank you to @mikeschatz.bsky.social, @rajivmccoy.bsky.social and @aabiddanda.bsky.social for all their work on this.

🧵 A thread on the key results and takeaways from our work:
Assembling unmapped reads reveals hidden variation in South Asian genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653340v1
Reposted by Arun Das
Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...
DNA scientist James Watson has a remarkably long history of sexist, racist public comments
“People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty,” he said in 2003. “I think it would be great.”
www.vox.com
November 7, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
Check out the cool work being presented by our students at Genome Informatics! This year’s event was co-organized by @benlangmead.bsky.social, & features talks from @vikramshivakumar.bsky.social & more, plus posters from @alexsweeten.bsky.social, @maojanlin.bsky.social, & @sinamajidian.bsky.social:
Johns Hopkins researchers to present at Genome Informatics 2025
Students from the Department of Computer Science will give talks and present posters on their research in genome informatics.
www.cs.jhu.edu
November 4, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
Fantastic talk by @vikramshivakumar.bsky.social Mumemto—Scalable multi-MUM finding for pangenomes
Papers biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.20.654611 & doi.org/10.1186/s13059-025-03644-0
Code: github.com/vikshiv/mume...
Very efficient pangenome visualization tool, revealing synteny and variations!
November 6, 2025 at 1:13 AM
Today, for no particular reason at all, it is worth sharing this, as a reminder of what one man's lies can do.

Taken from this resource from my alma mater: costsofwar.watson.brown.edu

(Specific page is: costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human/...)
November 4, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
Delighted to finally announce a preprint describing the Q100 project! “A complete diploid human genome benchmark for personalized genomics” For which we finished HG002 to near-perfect accuracy: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵[1/14]
A complete diploid human genome benchmark for personalized genomics
Human genome resequencing typically involves mapping reads to a reference genome to call variants; however, this approach suffers from both technical and reference biases, leaving many duplicated and ...
www.biorxiv.org
September 22, 2025 at 5:01 PM
Small victories, but this doesn’t seem to apply to those currently on an H-1B visa.

Wish it was made clear in the initial “proclamation”, before we spent the entire day panicking while trying to figure out a way to get a friend back to the US before midnight.
September 20, 2025 at 9:12 PM
This is catastrophic.

So, so many people I know and love are going to find it impossible to stay and work in the US, and it makes it almost impossible for people like me to stay and work here in the longer term, no matter how qualified we are.
September 20, 2025 at 1:20 AM
Reposted by Arun Das
New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX
lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...
September 12, 2025 at 3:26 AM
Extremely disappointed in my alma mater, who have chosen to fold without a fight and endanger the most vulnerable members of our community instead of standing up for them.

Spineless and shameful.
Breaking News: Brown University was said to have reached a deal with the Trump administration to restore federal funding. nyti.ms/459nQzY
July 30, 2025 at 10:08 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
Getting into computational biology this summer? 🏖️ 📖 Check out “Beyond the Human Genome Project: The Age of Complete Human Genome Sequences and Pangenome References” by @arun-das.bsky.social‬, @mikeschatz.bsky.social, and more for a great introduction to the field:
Beyond the Human Genome Project: The Age of Complete Human Genome Sequences and Pangenome References | Annual Reviews
The Human Genome Project was an enormous accomplishment, providing a foundation for countless explorations into the genetics and genomics of the human species. Yet for many years, the human genome ref...
www.annualreviews.org
June 24, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
Excited to share a new update to Mumemto, scaling MUM and conserved element finding to any size pangenome! Preprint out now w/ @benlangmead.bsky.social.
Mumemto scales to the new HPRC v2 release and beyond, and can merge in future assemblies without any recomputation! 1/n
Partitioned Multi-MUM finding for scalable pangenomics
Pangenome collections are growing to hundreds of high-quality genomes. This necessitates scalable methods for constructing pangenome alignments that can incorporate newly-sequenced assemblies. We prev...
www.biorxiv.org
May 27, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Easily the most important thing happening next week.

Come and watch my friend Sara defend her PhD!
I'm defending my PhD next Friday, May 23!(!!!!). I'll be highlighting our work looking at aneuploidy in early human development. If you're interested I'd love to have you join via Zoom (DM me for info) or on the Homewood campus!
May 16, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
Really cool work from @arun-das.bsky.social on recovering sequence from unmapped reads (even with T2T reference or HPRC pangenomes!). Can recover a decent amount of sequence per individual using these approaches. Check it out!
Our pre-print on investigating variation in South Asian genomes is now out!

Thank you to @mikeschatz.bsky.social, @rajivmccoy.bsky.social and @aabiddanda.bsky.social for all their work on this.

🧵 A thread on the key results and takeaways from our work:
Assembling unmapped reads reveals hidden variation in South Asian genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653340v1
May 15, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Reposted by Arun Das
@arun-das.bsky.social's thesis research demonstrates that short-read mapping-based approaches, even using complete linear (T2T-CHM13) and pangenome (HPRC) references, miss a lot of variation that can be recovered from unmapped reads.
Our pre-print on investigating variation in South Asian genomes is now out!

Thank you to @mikeschatz.bsky.social, @rajivmccoy.bsky.social and @aabiddanda.bsky.social for all their work on this.

🧵 A thread on the key results and takeaways from our work:
Assembling unmapped reads reveals hidden variation in South Asian genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653340v1
May 15, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Our pre-print on investigating variation in South Asian genomes is now out!

Thank you to @mikeschatz.bsky.social, @rajivmccoy.bsky.social and @aabiddanda.bsky.social for all their work on this.

🧵 A thread on the key results and takeaways from our work:
Assembling unmapped reads reveals hidden variation in South Asian genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653340v1
May 15, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Happening at 2pm in Biondi - come and check out Vikram’s great work!
Excited to share our latest work on comparing and visualizing multiple genome assemblies to identify conservation and structural variation in pangenomes with Mumemto! Check out poster 250 at #bog25 if you are here. New preprint coming very soon 👀
May 9, 2025 at 4:28 PM
Thank you to everyone who attended, and thank you to everyone who got me to this point - I appreciate you all.

I'm on the job market this summer, so please send any interesting opportunities my way 😃
May 2, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Hello Bluesky 👋🏾

I’m going to be defending my thesis on Wednesday, so I thought this was as good a time as any to introduce myself and my work.

I’m Arun Das, I’m a PhD student in Schatz Lab @ JHU, and my work broadly focuses on algorithms to improve accessibility and representation in genomics.
April 21, 2025 at 9:24 PM