Paul Gardner

Professorship (W2) (6 years/tenure track) of Computational Plant Systematics. Munich, Germany. #plantscijob #plantscijobs #plantsciencejob job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/9...

Today I am sharing a new preprint and accompanying blog post. Hundreds of published papers include impossible western blots showing protein expression in cell lines that have deleted or mutated genes. These clumsy mistakes are widespread and repeated by LLMs.

Online by @baptscc.bsky.social @aidybarnett.bsky.social and David Causeur Suspected distortion of citations in high-impact cancer journals 🧪 #PaperMills that produce & sell manuscripts may be manipulating citations, but the extent of any manipulation is unknown. 1/5 www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

In commemoration of 100 yrs of publicly-funded science in AoNZ: 1. The role of fundamental science (& who in fact does it): newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/30/l... 2. Why politicians need to back up out of picking winners: newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/31/g... 3. My 1st response to the killing of the Marsden Fund:

That's a first. Reviewing the literature can be dangerous I suppose.

🚀 We're Hiring! The Department of Genetics is seeking an Assistant/Associate Professor in Pathogen Genetics. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to teaching excellence, and join our world leading community in Genetics. 📢 Apply www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

Is the group who objected to a seesaw in central Dunedin really going to support street art?

I walked into the living room when an underwater body fell out of a hole in the bottom of a boat. Didn't sleep well for days...

My department at University of Utah is recruiting new faculty, with "Human" and "Genetics" broadly defined. It is a fantastic place to start a lab, with collaboration, creativity and conviviality encouraged. Applications due Oct 16. Please share and apply! utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/208...

#marsdenshmarsden I guess 🪦

Happy to share results of the @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social phase 1, providing reference genomes covering 21 bat families. New insights into bat phylogeny, ancestral genome reconstruction, European origin & ancestral echolocation. Great work by a team of 100+ colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is well worth a read by anyone thinking about the impacts of AI on education IMHO: aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

Many important bacterial non-coding RNAs and structural elements remain undiscovered. To help, David Li, Garyk Brixi, Michael Fischbach, @brianhie.bsky.social & team introduce Minerva, which uses a genome language model to predict RNA base pairing, repeats, & other interactions from sequence alone.

Careful implementation of Bayesian phylogenetics in Delphy allows huge speed gains and identical results to BEAST, but runs on your laptop browser www.nature.com/articles/s41... Amazing work from @pardissabeti.bsky.social , Patrick Varilly, @benfry.com and co.

One of the (well, >1) problems in the lncRNA field is that some of the lncRNAs are not real genes, i.e., do not represent a standalone locus that produces independent transcripts. Some cases are more 🤔 than others, e.g. lncDACH that Matt Bennet from Andy Baker's lab took a deep dive into. 🧵

www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro.... This is well worth a listen -- @rnz.co.nz.web.brid.gy interview of @elisabethbik.bsky.social

Juliet Gerrard's book on her time as Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor is out. Practical and approachable with a nice frame of how and where science advice works. (I get mentioned! - only time I've asked my boss if I can have a shower). aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/front-row-se...

Four of twelve faked systematic reviews received identical replies overnight from TB Emran. MS Mubarak wrote much the same response a month ago - with no update or retraction yet. At this stage I have put more effort in than this papermill crowd.

This looks like an important read. The image captures what many educators have suspected for the last few years -- & is the reason we are moving away from written internal assessments. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Major spliceosomal RNA secondary structures, interactions (PDB), evolutionary conservation (PhyloP & Rfam SEEDs), and disease associations (D’Souza et al 2026). All in one monstrously busy plot. 😁

Well I like it! For the human spliceosomal RNA fans -- secondary structures & interactions mined from PDB & indicated by arcs between snRNA nucleotides which are plotted around the circle. Evolutionary conservation is from Rfam seed alignments and phyloP scores.

It's increasingly apparent that lncRNAs have been over-called. It'll take a lot of hard graft to clear these annotations out: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

University of Auckland is looking for: Lead Technologist – Genomics - Te Kura Mātauranga Koiora | School of Biological Sciences in Auckland, New Zealand. jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TheUniversit...

Biological Databases are critical infrastructure - not projects. As so much effort is put into harnessing AI to solve all our problems, we are allowing the foundational data resources crumble. Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects www.nature.com/articles/d41...

With this weeks release of provisional deaths as part of the quarterly population/births/deaths data for NZ, I can remake my expected vs. actual weekly mortality graph. I've. said before that in 2029 we should all look at the peak covid period from both time directions to look at inflection points.

Getting bacteria to re-use waste and create high value resources - meet Otago Biochemistry's newest recruit Dr Ross Eaglesfield www.otago.ac.nz/news/newsroo...

Thread. 👇

🎯 Goodhart’s law: if you make a list of variants the target, people will get really good at calling those variants. But those variants are not a genome! As a result, we’ve been stuck trying to read genomes under the lamppost of short reads [4/15]