The Sheppard Lab will be moving to @oxfordbiology and the new @ineosoxford in September this year. We are very excited and hope to get lots of visitors. Sam will also take up a new role at @stannescollege

Last week our lab appeared on Channel 4 news to discussion the impact of the intensification of livestock production on the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistant zoonotic pathogens. Full link:

https://www.channel4.com/news/activists-call-for-judicial-review-of-intensive-farming-to-combat-another-pandemic

Biel is visiting our lab from Barcelona University to carry out bioinformatics projects to understand the genomics of pathogen emergence in livestock.

A few years in the making, but we’re finally pleased to see our paper on the emergence of virulence in avian Ecoli (APEC) published in Nature Communications.

University press release [link]

Referenced in Guardian article on Chicken disease [link]
Twitter thread [link]

Sam Sheppard from the University of Bath presents at the ARTICnetwork & CLIMB-BIG-DATA workshop on COVID-19 data analysis, motivating why we should use genomics in an epidemic. He gives background on typing schemes, different ways of sequencing and challenges such as how you can analyse large mounts of genomic data.
Micro binfie podcast [link]

CLIMB-NG Workshop: www.climb.ac.uk/artic-and-climb-b…a-joint-workshop/

The group’s latest paper investigating the emergence of cattle specialist strains of Campylobacter jejuni associated with intensive animal agriculture was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Abstract below]

We are glad to welcome Jaspreet Mahindroo to the lab, who is visiting as part of her PhD studies with Dr. Neelam Taneja at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh in India. We’re very happy to help Jaspreet characterize her Campylobacter genomes and investigate potential sources of infection in India.

From left to right: Ben, Grant, Jess, Sam, Jaspreet & Evangelos.

Darwin Day Lecture, Wednesday February 19th, 2020
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution 16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN

Dr. Kat Arney – Everything You Know About Genetics Is Wrong.
Many of us learn about genetics in school starting with Mendel and his pea plants. We learn that one gene is linked to one trait, and one gene fault causes one disease. But the recent revolution in DNA sequencing is revealing that it’s much more complicated. People are not peas – and even peas are not peas! Dr Kat Arney, author of Herding Hemingways Cats: understanding how our genes work and How to Code a Human, explains how much we really know about how our genetic blueprints dictate our characteristics and health.