Dominik Lücking
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dominikluecking.bsky.social
Dominik Lücking
@dominikluecking.bsky.social
120 followers 260 following 12 posts
GVs, Phages, MGEs and Bioinf :)
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
willemsenanouk.bsky.social
Last week we wrapped up the first edition of the Virus evolution and ecology course under the umbrella of the brand new Master in Microbiome Science offered @univie.ac.at. We learned about viruses, their evolution, and their ecological impact across different ecosystems. 1/2

#VirEvol
December 10, 2025 at 11:06 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
mkddueholm.bsky.social
Microflora Danica: What can you learn from collecting and sequencing 10,000+ samples from a single country? Check out our new paper in @nature.com to find out. Incredible work led by Caitlin Singleton, Thomas B. N. Jensen, and Mads Albertsen from @aau.dk. 🦠🧫🧬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Microflora Danica atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes - Nature
Microflora Danica—an atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes—reveals that although human-disturbed habitats have high alpha diversity, species reoccur, revealing hidden homogeneity.
www.nature.com
December 3, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
evbc.bsky.social
📢Join us for the next ECR #Viromics Webinar
"Drawing from phage diversity to uncover genomic factors shaping host interaction"
‍🎙️Antônio P. Camargo, Uni São Paulo, Brazil 
🗓️10 Dec. 2025, 4 PM CET
📍Online/Zoom (register for login details)
👉 https://evbc.uni-jena.de/events/ecr-viromics-webinar-series/
December 4, 2025 at 6:03 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
simrouxvirus.bsky.social
🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...
Meta-virus resource (MetaVR): expanding the frontiers of viral diversity with 24 million uncultivated virus genomes
Abstract. Viruses are ubiquitous in all environments and impact host metabolism, evolution, and ecology, although our knowledge of their biodiversity is st
academic.oup.com
December 3, 2025 at 2:34 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
banfieldlab.bsky.social
Out now in Nature Communications: Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@luisvalentin.bsky.social @lingdong-shi.bsky.social @martianmicrobe.bsky.social @mschoelmerich.bsky.social
Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses - Nature Communications
Borgs are large extrachromosomal elements of anaerobic methane-oxidizing archaea. Here, via in silico protein structure prediction of ~10,000 Borg proteins, the authors reveal that Borgs share numerou...
www.nature.com
November 28, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
mkrupovic.bsky.social
Check out our latest paper on mirusviruses, one of the most remarkable new groups of protist viruses - extremely diverse, carry lots of spliceosomal introns (including new homing introns) and are at the evolutionary crossroads between tailed phages and herpesviruses! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Widespread and intron-rich mirusviruses are predicted to reproduce in nuclei of unicellular eukaryotes - Nature Microbiology
Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.
www.nature.com
November 28, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
giantvirus.bsky.social
Our work in collaboration with @jedfuhrman.bsky.social lab on the temporal dynamics of marine giant viruses published in ISME communications. PhD student Benjamin Minch is a co-first author. Please take a look!

academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...
Validate User
academic.oup.com
November 26, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
plosbiology.org
#Virus discovery has accelerated but linking viruses to hosts is hard. @sullivan-lab.bsky.social use synthetic #microbiomes to optimize & benchmark #Hi-C for virus-host linkage inference, applying this to existing #soil data to reveal 100s of novel linkages @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3MlAENO
Comparison of virus-host prediction from Hi-C and in silico tools. Top: Eular plot showing the overlap of viruses with host predictions obtained from the experimental Hi-C linkage approach, or one of two in silico tools (iPHoP and VirMatcher) that use different probabilistic models to aggregate output of various sequence-based features to create host prediction scores. Bottom: Comparison of virus-host predictions across all samples between Hi-C and iPHoP, shown with and without applying a Z-score filter for the Hi-C linkages. Black bars indicate congruent predictions identified from both tools and gray bars indicate non-congruent predictions. Note: Although many viruses had multiple predicted hosts from each tool, only the top-scoring prediction for each virus was considered in this comparison.
November 25, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
dkarpa.bsky.social
In capitalism, we cannot expect companies to do anything else than maximise profits. Doing so is not only naive but harmful
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Nov 11
For-profit journals are supposed to improve research quality, yet they're perversely incentivized to churn out whatever they can monetize. This was happening before AI (see Strain: bit.ly/43gJPUM), and AI will make it worse.

It's insane that we volunteer our time to help them do so.

4/n
November 12, 2025 at 8:45 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
acritschristoph.bsky.social
I think you're thinking of these! graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...
Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines
The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, generally declined after vaccines were introduced.
graphics.wsj.com
November 10, 2025 at 12:09 PM
dominikluecking.bsky.social
I'm looking for a specific figure I saw on bsky recently on here: It was a heatmap-like plot showing the effectiveness of vaccines. X axis was time, Y axis was different viruses / diseases and you could easily see how each of them disappeared after a vaccine was developed. Any ideas?
November 10, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
patrick-pausch.bsky.social
After 5 years of waiting, the new #CRISPR classification by Makarova et al. is out @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...
An updated evolutionary classification of CRISPR–Cas systems including rare variants - Nature Microbiology
An exploration of previously undescribed variants from the long tail of the CRISPR–Cas distribution.
www.nature.com
November 6, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
cotoorellana.bsky.social
The average nucleotide identity (ANI) underpins how we map microbial diversity, compare species, and connect genomes to ecology.
I wrote a short piece reflecting on the discovery and significance of this metric (and really enjoyed digging into the context and story behind it!) #microsky 🧬
Average nucleotide identity — the backbone of modern ecological genomics - Nature Reviews Genetics
In this Journal Club, Luis Orellana recalls a 2005 publication by Konstantinidis and Tiedje that introduced average nucleotide identity as a sequence-based metric to determine the relatedness between ...
www.nature.com
October 30, 2025 at 9:11 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
mpimarinemicrobio.bsky.social
Congratulations @lqueiss.bsky.social 👏🎉😀

Lauren won the Best Poster Award at the Women in Electron Microscopy (#WeM) – Exchange and Networking event @fz-juelich.de

Pic: FZJülich/Kurt Steinhausen
www.mpi-bremen.de/en/Lauren-Qu...

#WomeninSTEM #marinescience #MachMINT @maxplanck.de #FemaleScience
October 27, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
robert.bio
Just published an interactive article about a magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which powers sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa: sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt

It's also notoriously unintuitive so I'm hoping this article helps you build that intuition.
October 9, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
willemsenanouk.bsky.social
Proud moment to see the first Master student of the team (Lotte Mayer) successfully defend her Master's thesis work digging into viral factories of #giantViruses.

A link to part of her work:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

@erc.europa.eu @univie.ac.at @cemess.bsky.social @dome-vienna.bsky.social
September 9, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
willemsenanouk.bsky.social
Last week #ESEB2025 wrapped up. It was a great opportunity to chat with colleagues, hear about great evolutionary research, present the group's work, and be a proud PI of Laura, who did a great job presenting her PhD work! Two years to go until next ESEB!

@eseb2025.bsky.social
August 26, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
lukehillary.bsky.social
A really great review written by @simrouxvirus.bsky.social and Clement Coclet on the state of the field of viromics and viral ecology. Well worth a look, and provides a solid reading list for those entering the field wanting more background on how it has developed and what tools are available.
July 22, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
daanspeth.bsky.social
I'm happy to announce the latest release of the GlobDB, available at globdb.org.

The GlobDB is a database of "species dereplicated" microbial genomes, and as of release 226 contains twice the number of species-representative genomes (306,260) than the latest GTDB release.
home | GlobDB
globdb.org
June 10, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
willemsenanouk.bsky.social
New work out!

Spearheaded by Lotte, we have developed a single-molecule messenger RNA fluorescence in situ hybridisation (smFISH) protocol for #giantViruses in an #Acanthamoeba host.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

1/4

#ProtistsOnSky #MicroSky @dome-vienna.bsky.social @cemess.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu
May 8, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
matthiaswietz.bsky.social
Our new study in @naturecomms.bsky.social showing the recurrent assembly of microbial modules over polar day and night, based on four years of autonomous sampling in the Arctic www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fantastic teamwork by #AWI @mpimarinemicrobio.bsky.social @hhu.bsky.social & many others 🙂
February 4, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
evbc.bsky.social
🚨 🌟 Submissions & Registrations Open for #ViBioM2025! 🌟 🚨
Join us 13–15 May 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal! 🦠💻 Present your research, connect with global experts, and shape the future of #Virology & #Bioinformatics.

📅 Details & links: evbc.uni-jena.de/events/vibio...
January 19, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
audeber.bsky.social
What is the diversity of antiphage systems out there ?

We used protein and genomic language models (and defense score!) to start bringing some answers: >45 000 protein families.

Leb by E. Mordret.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interactive UMAP to have fun
mdmparis.github.io/antiphage-la...
January 9, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
merenbey.bsky.social
We are very happy to announce a free-to-attend #anvio workshop and ECR symposium in Oldenburg to discuss integrated microbial 'omics and learn applications of anvi'o.

More information and application link (application deadline is Jan 10): anvio.org/workshops/20...

Please apply and/or circulate 😇
December 16, 2024 at 10:38 AM
Reposted by Dominik Lücking
evbc.bsky.social
🚨 Save the Date! 🚨
We're excited to announce #ViBioM2025, the International Virus Bioinformatics Meeting, happening 13–15 May 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal! 🦠💻
Stay tuned for further details: evbc.uni-jena.de/vibiom2025/
#VirusBioinformatics
December 3, 2024 at 10:14 AM