Over the past three years I’ve served as an Editor for the American Joᴜrnαl of Traffic and Transportation Engineering1 journal Microbial Genomics. Now my term has ended, here are some reflections on what I’ve learnt about the publishing process during my tenure from the editorial side. I hope this might be useful for authors and reviewers, especially earlier in their careers. The journal Microbial Genomics (‘MGen’) is run by the UK Microbiology Society, started in 2014, and I believe is doing rather well in terms of submissions.

The games I played and liked last year were almost all really good. This time I’ve given points out of five for fun and memorableness/creativeness, which I think are the two main things I care about, and an overall score. Perfect Tides (point and click adventure) Welcome to Fire Island/Perfect Tides. (Perfect Tides) Perfect Tides is a coming of age story set in the year 2000, on a seasonal island in the US.

This is a mini-review (just highlighting some initial thoughts) of this preprint: Compressive Pangenomics Using Mutation-Annotated Networks Sumit Walia, Harsh Motwani, Kyle Smith, Russell Corbett-Detig, Yatish Turakhia https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.02.601807v2 This is an extension of the idea of mutation annotated trees which were successfully applied to SARS-CoV-2 in the UShER (and related) software. Phylogenies are stored as a sequence of mutations on each branch from the root, rather than keeping all sequences. This is not unlikely the use of ancestral recombination graphs to represent genotypes and evolutionary history in e.

This illuminating tweet from Michael Baym on how restrictive the biorender license is reminded me of a little post I’d meant to write. You’ve probably noticed a profileration of Biorender images in talks, papers, grants and especially graphical abstracts you’ve seen in recent years. I think I’ve seen these really increasing in prevalance over the past couple of years, maybe because of institutional subscriptions, maybe because we have been seeing increasing numbers of our peers using it and don’t want to be left out.

RapidNJ is a really nice program for making neighbour-joining trees from distance matrices or alignment data. If you try and compile on an M1 Mac however, you’ll get errors that look like this: In file included from src/main.cpp:1: In file included from src/stdinclude.h:9: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/clang/15.0.0/include/emmintrin.h:14:2: error: "This header is only meant to be used on x86 and x64 architecture" #error "This header is only meant to be used on x86 and x64 architecture" These Intel intrinsics in emmintrin.

This is the 2023 edition of my now yearly series of reviews of video games I’ve played over the last year (2020-2021, 2022). I’ve only played five games this year, to my slight surprise all of which were on the Switch. So this year’s post is a chronological list, and I’m going to start giving them ratings out of five. Definitely more great games this year than last. Triangle Strategy (RPG, turn-based) If you ever played Final Fantasy Tactics this type of game will be very familiar, and of course it has the same developer.