Francisco De La Vega

🧬 #ASHG2026 Today at 5:19 PM (Room 517), Frank Onyambu (CMBG, Kenya) presents exciting immunogenetics research on East African populations, revealing genetic diversity and local admixture with PCLAI. Powered by Ultima! 🚀 Great collaboration with CMBG and Alex Ioannidis’ group!

My group's paper out on the cover of Science! Native Hawaiians are most closely related to the Rapanui of distant Easter Island 😮 Proud of my students the two co-first authors Cole Shanks & former MS student Edward Huang and 3rd author group member Chris Thomassin. www.science.org/eprint/4HAYG...

TFW somehow it's news that some people don't think that "AI" is going to kill us all... I mean, it's better than not having this perspective represented I suppose (and I appreciate the shout out to The AI Con). www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/w...

Imagine that - a novel, highly divergent, betacoronavirus with a weird-looking* furin cleavage site popped right out of a bat butt 🦇. You gotta wonder 🤔. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Anthony Fauci made mistakes. But his diary reveals a conscientious public servant trying to save as many lives as he could during the pandemic. His recent summons before a Senate committee was surely intended to humiliate him. It should embarrass America

Are you saying the DOJ withdrew that pool vandalism indictment… upon reflection?

#HiTSeq afternoon keynote featuring Chris Mason from Weill Cornell Medicine: “Genetic and epigenetic engineering and technologies to prepare for deep space”, 5:00 PM at International Ballroom Center - you cannot miss it! #ISMB2026

#ISMB2026 welcome to the first day of #HitSeq! We will start this year session at 11AM with a keynote form Andre Kahles: “Petabase-Scale Sequence Search with MetaGraph” at International Ballroom Center. Full schedule: www.hitseq.org/schedule.html

Winning! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I am really proud to share the Stand Up for Science Foundation's new Impact Report on the OMB Rule Proposal--done by the brilliant @irenesufs.bsky.social @colesci.bsky.social and team! We've got such a great team at @standupforscience.net. www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-a...

Our official guide to help you write a public comment on the OMB-2026-0034 is here: zurl.co/XgyzA Submit your comment and take additional actions here: zurl.co/RiDuv #StandUpForScience #OMB #Vought #SaveScience #FundScience

NEJM editors highlight 3 aspects of recently proposed rule changes as particularly striking: decisions on research funding would be made by political appointees, funding could be cut off midway through a grant period, and foreign interactions would be limited. Learn more: https://nej.md/43yBIUb

This is integrity in leadership. www.science.org/content/arti...

Are you ready for #ESHG2026 in Gothenburg? 🌊 A vibrant coastal city where nature meets urban life. Don’t miss out—register now and explore all it has to offer! 2026.eshg.org/registration/ Photo credits: Bilderboken (Unsplash), Hans Ott (Unsplash), Philip Myrtorp (Unsplash)

Our paper entitled "The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians" is now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1.... A really fun and informative collaboration with @mharris.bsky.social, Ziyi Mo and Adam Siepel. (1/n)

NanoLabel: A fast and accurate real-time nanopore signal classifier https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.03.722500v1

F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...

"Defending against emerging diseases is literally a matter of life & death. Our government’s negligence endangers us" I do think RFK Jr & Bhattacharya killing mRNA vaccine R&D, & Bhattacharya killing federal funding for pandemic research & pushing for no preparedness at all, were unforgivable acts

It is with great sadness that we announce J. Craig Venter has died. 🧪🧬 www.jcvi.org/media-center...

The FCC is now threatening ABC's broadcast licenses, days after Donald Trump and Melania Trump demanded they fire Jimmy Kimmel. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Mr. President: Read the Constitution. Freedom of speech is the First Amendment for good reason.

Here's the follow up on this fraud Retraction Watch The website of the publisher and journal have been taken down retractionwatch.com/2026/04/23/e...

A study of Mexican citizens shows that dissatisfaction with democracy predicts low engagement with voting, both as voters and as poll workers. According to the authors, the global decline in satisfaction with democracy is cause for concern. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/9k9X50YIlVP

Excellent post from @caseynewton.bsky.social on Sam Altman, the attacks on his home, Altman’s own words, and OpenAI lobbying www.platformer.news/sam-altman-a...

Despite the obvious superiority of fresh-frozen material for genomics, many samples are still stored in FFPE and remain challenging to characterize with Whole-genome sequencing. But here comes our solution:

"All of these things frighten me, and they should frighten you as well. I made the decision to create a life for myself here, because I viewed this as a place that rewarded determination, hard work, and integrity. It still has a chance to be that place again." open.substack.com/pub/ofthebra...

Deadline for abstracts for a chance of a talk at #HiTSeq26 and #ISMB26 is tomorrow- please send your abstracts!

Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com ! We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇

Graph transformer for ancient ancestry inference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.05.714076v1

Submit via the ISMB 2026 system and select HiTSeq as the track. More info at hitseq.org.

#HitSeq is the annual ISCB gathering focused on high-throughput sequencing algorithms, and about 50% of talks are selected from submitted abstracts. This year’s keynote speakers are Christopher Mason, Mihaela Pertea, and Andre Kahles 🤖

Abstract deadline approaching for #HitSeq26 at #ISMB2026: April 9 ⏰🧬💻 If you are developing new algorithms, methods, or tools for high-throughput sequencing data, please submit an abstract for a chance to present a talk or poster at the meeting in Washington, DC, July 12-16.

Point cloud local ancestry inference (PCLAI): continuous coordinate-based ancestry along the genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.23.713813v1

Matt Ridley gave the inaugural "NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series" earlier today and I just wanted to run through some of the main claims he made - you'll be unsurprised to learn that almost all of them are false. Here's his summary slide - let's start there. 🧵👇

Current rules for medical devices are a poor fit for GenAI’s flexible nature. It’s not just about accuracy; 70% of AI datasets have license issues, and hallucinations make automated monitoring a mess. The authors here call for an adaptive, global frameworks to keep clinical AI safe. #MedSky #MedAI

Seen outside the Baltimore Convention Center during ACMG 2026

NIH/NSF funding is, for all intents and purposes, frozen again. This somehow almost feels worse than last year. They are running out the clock on biomedical science and all PIs can do is scramble to finish projects before our resources dry up. www.science.org/content/arti...

Read @flodebarre.bsky.social's original analysis: pandemonium.hypotheses.org/898. While the original WeChat post is bonkers, it points to unreleased data from the market, including: 1️⃣ Potentially infected animals in "Stall A" - the hot-spot inside the market. 2️⃣ +Serology of vendor from Stall A.

Favorite Line of the Night because the truth... matters. #PedoPrez

Read why NIH colleagues resigned. Brave writing from Sylvia Chou, Alexa Romberg, Paul Grothaus and Vani Pariyadath. 🧪 #science #standupforscience #integrity www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n...

EXCLUSIVE: Military leaders warned Hegseth not to gut the offices that limit risk to civilians. He ignored them. The decision faces renewed attention as the Pentagon investigates a strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed hundreds of children.

New paper showing that much of the apparent success of protein language models in predicting mutational effects is a mirage: These models mostly memorize sites. 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Trump Administration is waging war on universities by suspending their funds. N.I.H. grants to universities are down by more than 90 per cent in the current fiscal year; so far in 2026, the National Cancer Institute hasn’t made a single grant. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/oxA7Ey

news.virginia.edu/content/memo...

"No stupid rules of engagement"

Vinay Prasad has been an a noxious influence on public health and drug regulation. Good riddance. UCSF should not take him back. He should wander in the wilderness forever. www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/h...

There Is No Plan