Thread by @wormmaps

One last thing before I drop off for the holidays… a bit of behind the scenes on our new paper

Before there was a thing called Verena, there was me and @Gfalbery, some long chats over beers, and 12% of an idea for something called VirusNet - a team that would stop duplicating efforts and pseudoreplicating the same analyses of the host-virus network, and go far together

It’s absolutely bewildering to think this is the first thing @viralemergence worked on and that it’s finally, finally out there.

Greg and I started working on this set of ideas in summer 2019, long before COVID-19. We did the figures early in the lockdown, if I remember right? But we’ve spent 2.5 years working with the team on this study, refining it, figuring out how to distill an entire field down.

The first draft of this paper - lovingly referred to on the team as “the long baby” - was over 9,000 words. I want to thank our amazing editor at @NatureMicrobiol, Dr. Susan Jones, for pushing us to write the best paper we could - to condense, refine, clarify. It helped so much.

But I also want to thank the literal dozens of people who have made possible not just this paper but everything else that interlocks with it. There are entire studies we did on this team to prove something could work and drop it in this review.

I think that’s what’s so special about it for me - people call review papers “a road map for…” all the time, but we’ve actually been quietly following this one for two years. I’m really phenomenally proud of everyone’s contributions to it. And grateful.

You can read our paper “The science of the host-virus network” in @NatureMicrobiol now 😊

nature.com/articles/s4156…