Hello Mastodon! Please enjoy this picture of a hummingbird I took last week. Much nicer than a little blue bird, don't you think? 😜

#photography #hummingbird #birdphotos

If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between a seal and a sea lion then HAVE I GOT THE CHART FOR YOU.

Your semi-regular reminder that working in #academia is a #job, not (just?) a calling. Don’t accept shitty labor practices.

@academicchatter #AcademicMastodon

4 yr PhD in Manchester, UK: The evolution of nerves: understanding the roots of neurodegeneration

TRAINING in evol. biol., biochem., expansion or electron microsc., cell culture, #Drosophila genetics, #scicomm

SUPERVISION: Prokop/Allan/Ronshaugen

DETAILS: thenode.biologists.com/jobs/pr

For #FungiFriday, Velvet Shank (Flammulina velutipes). A glistening caramel-coloured fungi that grows in wonderful tiers on dead wood. Found on dead roots of Gorse on Castle Hill, Brighton. #fungi

Quadratic computations maintain neural specificity to natural stimuli across stages of visual processing biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Quadratic computations maintain neural specificity to natural stimuli across stages of visual processing

Despite recent successes in machine vision, artificial recognition systems continue to be less robust than biological systems. The brittleness of artificial recognition system has been attributed to the linearity of the core operation that matches inputs to target patterns at each stage of the system. Here we analyze responses of neurons from the visual areas V1, V2, and V4 of the brain using the framework that incorporates quadratic computations into multi-stage models. These quadratic computations make it possible to capture local recurrent computation, and in particular, nonlinear suppressive interactions between visual features. We find that incorporating quadratic computation not only strongly improved predictive power of the resulting model, but also revealed several computation motifs that increased the selectivity of neural responses to natural stimuli. These motifs included the organization of excitatory and suppressive features along mutually exclusive hypotheses about incoming stimuli, such as orthogonal orientations or opposing motion directions. The balance between excitatory and suppressive features was largely maintained across brain regions. These results emphasize the importance and properties of quadratic computations that are necessary for achieving robust object recognition. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

www.biorxiv.org

Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae encodes multiple phase-variable DNA methyltransferases that comprise distinct phasevarions biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae encodes multiple phase-variable DNA methyltransferases that comprise distinct phasevarions

Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae is the cause of porcine pleuropneumonia, a severe respiratory tract infection that is responsible for major economic losses to the swine industry. Many host-adapted bacterial pathogens encode systems known as phasevarions (phase-variable regulons). Phasevarions result from variable expression of cytoplasmic DNA methyltransferases. Variable expression results in genome-wide methylation differences within a bacterial population, leading to altered expression of multiple genes via epigenetic mechanisms. Our examination of a diverse population of A. pleuropneumoniae strains determined that Type I and Type III DNA methyltransferases with the hallmarks of phase variation were present in this species. We demonstrate that phase variation is occurring in these methyltransferase, and show associations between particular Type III methyltransferase alleles and serovar. Using Pacific BioSciences Single-Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) sequencing and Oxford Nanopore sequencing, we demonstrate the presence of the first ever characterised phase-variable, cytosine-specific Type III DNA methyltransferase. Phase variation of distinct Type III DNA methyltransferase variants results in the regulation of distinct phasevarions, and in multiple phenotypic differences relevant to pathobiology. Our characterisation of these newly described phasevarions in A. pleuropneumoniae will aid in the selection of stably expressed antigens, and direct and inform development of a rationally designed subunit vaccine against this major veterinary pathogen. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

www.biorxiv.org

Check out the EukProt v3 BLAST database with The Comparative Set (TCS) (with 196 species chosen based on BUSCO completion and phylogenetic importance)
Jeremy Wideman
evocellbio.com/eukprot/

SAVE THE DATE: We are happy to announce that the Workshop on Genomics 2023 will take place on the 14-27th of May. Save it in your calendars, and share it with those interested!

For the first time, we will introduce an Equal Opportunities bursary system for low- and lower-middle income countries within and outside the EU.

evomics.org/2023-workshop-on-g

picking a mastodon server to join is easy -- just think of it like you're allying with one of many families in a war-torn medieval land, each with their own histories, feuds, laws, blood rituals

Cryptogam is an outdated term that was originally used to designate all non-animals that did not produce by visible seeds in the Linnaean binomial system. This included things like spore bearing plants (byrophytes, liverworts, ferns, etc), lichen, and fungi, which now are spread out, more accurately, into their appropriate kingdoms.

Its a great word though, isn't it?

#Lichen #LichenSubscribe #moss #Mosstodon #mushrooms #fungi #ferns #photography #botany #WordOfTheDay

classes should be available on prescription! Don’t think I’ve ever left one not feeling 100 times better than when I walked in! (It should be noted that I’m not terribly good and mostly flail about like someone who’s walked into a cobweb but it’s so much fun!!)🤩🤩

After qualifying as a I somehow ended up doing an MSc in and a PhD looking at communities followed by a job as a bioinformatician in human . So, it's fair to say my radiography skills are... rusty! However, in Jan I will be moving to a new job focussing on research where I will be able to put my rusty radiography skills back into practice!

One of the things I now need to work on is regaining my HCPC registration as a radiographer, which obviously lapsed whilst I was off playing with microbes! To do this I need to complete a portfolio of a few hundred hours worth of study and practical experience. I'm lucky enough to have access to Exeter uni's library and their medical imaging course material but I am also going to be searching out lots of online resources which will hopefully help me refresh my memory of all things medical imaging! As I find them I will share useful resources on here and as I continue to connect with people who have similar interests I hope they might be useful for others too! 😃

To start with, radiopaedia, a great general radiology site with lots of articles and case studies: radiopaedia.org/

this is my little rescue dog, Folly. She likes to help me work and sees herself as a future bioinformatician 🤔🐶

I qualified as a radiographer but currently a bioinformaticion working in human genetics (have also worked in microbial genomics). Soon to be starting a postdoc in medical imaging. I live in Devon with my two kids and my dog. Interested in politics and all things science!

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