Delighted to share our latest work in its final form (and open access!). Here, we studied the rate at which somatic mutations accumulate in different species to address some long-standing hypotheses. 🧵… 1/
nature.com/articles/s4158… Somatic mutations are responsible for cancer and have long been speculated to contribute to ageing and other diseases. However, studying somatic mutations in normal tissues has been technically extremely challenging as most occur in single cells or microscopic clones of cells. 2/

As far as I can see, the UK is running out of time to avoid reaching a situation like Italy's or Spain's. Some data and analyses below. Apologies for any mistakes and please challenge or correct any claims. Data source: github.com/CSSEGISandData… #Covid19uk [1/11] UK cases continue to rise at an approx. exponential rate, with a 25-30% daily increase in cases, doubling every ~2.9 days (faster rise of deaths). This is nearly identical (3.0 days) to the Italian growth at the same stage of the epidemic. [2/11]

A little thread to honour Sydney Brenner. There was a time when molecular biology was heresy and closer to theoretical biology than experimental biology. Working hand in hand with Crick and others, Sydney laid the foundations of modern biology. 1/ webofstories.com/play/sydney.br… In 1957 he published what one could almost call the first bioinformatics paper. Using the published sequences of short peptides from 7 proteins from Sanger and others, he demonstrated the impossibility of fully overlapping genetic codes. 2/ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Our latest work is now out in Science. Possibly the most fascinating dataset that I have had the privilege of working with. By deeply sequencing normal oesophagus we uncovered a hidden world of mutation and selection acting in our tissues as we age. [1/7] science.sciencemag.org/content/early/… We found that, although normal oesophagus mutates at ~10-times lower rate than sun-exposed skin, positive selection on cancer-driver mutations is so much stronger that by middle age over half of our oesophagus is colonised by clones carrying driver mutations. [2/7]