Dan Sprockett
New Assistant Professor | sprockettlab.com
My lab works on the ecology and evolution of the microbiome.
Former CIHMID Postdoc Fellow at Cornell. Stanford M&I Alum. NMDC Microbiome Data Champion @microbiomedata.org
- Reposted by Dan SprockettNew Preprint 📢 from our team 🔎 Critical assessment of #intratumor and #low #biomass #microbiome using #longread sequencing Some studies suggest bacteria 🦠 live inside tumors and influence cancer treatment. But there’s also been a major #debate: in these very low-microbe tissue samples, how much 1/
- Reposted by Dan SprockettNew preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life
- Novel genes arise from genomic deletions across the bacterial tree of life biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
- Sometimes you find that you need a tool that does a specific thing, and the universe just manifests it... (...or maybe it was years of hard work by very clever colleagues).
- Reposted by Dan SprockettI think everyone can relate to the importance of science for healthcare, and I’ve been sharing these slides for people to use and adapt with their own stories! youtu.be/BY_SFgi-Cig
- I'll be @dukemedschool.bsky.social next week presenting my research: “Ancient Partnerships, Modern Insights: Tracing the Assembly, Transmission, and Evolution of Mammalian Gut Microbes”. sites.duke.edu/microbiome/2... Come say Hi! @duke-university.bsky.social #microbiome
- Reposted by Dan SprockettPoster deadline for the Keystone Microbiome Meeting in Banff is December 30th www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/... Will be a great meeting focused on human microbiomes, spanning basic, mechanistic, and applied. Organized by myself, @amibhatt.bsky.social , and Harry Sokol. Join us!
- Proud to have contributed to this important work! STREAMS guidelines: standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated #microbiome studies. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natmicrobiol.nature.com
- Reposted by Dan SprockettOk; mim (github.com/COMBINE-lab/...) preprint submitted! Excited for folks to see it and share thoughts. The key takeaway; mim allows the quick, one-time, building of a small auxiliary index that then allows scaling gzipped FASTQ parsing linearly in # of threads. 1/2
- If anyone happens to be around UNC Chapel Hill this week, I'll be speaking on Tuesday: www.med.unc.edu/cgibd/event/... @microbiomeunc.bsky.social #microbiome
- Reposted by Dan SprockettExcited to share a new preprint w/ the Sonnenberg lab, led by Matt Carter, @zzzhiru.bsky.social & @mattolm.bsky.social. We analyzed the microbiomes of two non-industrialized populations from opposite sides of the globe to try to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of our gut microbiota.
- Check out this incredible analysis! Prehistoric Global Migration of Vanishing Gut Microbes With Humans www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Dan SprockettThe Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601
- Reposted by Dan SprockettI am seeking a postdoc for my group at UCLA. We work at the intersection of population genetics x microbiome (garud.eeb.ucla.edu). If interested, please message me!
- Looks like it'll be a good one!
- Cell Symposia: Host-microbiome dynamics May 10–12, 2026 | Bruges, Belgium by @cp-immunity.bsky.social @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social and @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social www.cell-symposia.com/microbiome-2...
- Reposted by Dan SprockettExcited to share the Compendium Manager -- our new tool for scaling bioinformatics pipelines! Launch thousands of analyses, track progress, and maintain reproducibility. Developed by @richabdill.com. Check it out: arxiv.org/abs/2505.11385
- We wrote up the process we've developed for processing microbiome data in bulk! Workflow management tools are miraculous for processing a project with lots of samples, but when you have lots of *projects* too, as we do when pulling data from NCBI databases, it gets hard to juggle. #microbiomesky
- Reposted by Dan Sprockett#NatureMicroPicks Microbial integrons in focus 🦠🧬 Two studies showing microbial integrons encoding phage defense systems #MicroSky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- A very open-ended question: Has anyone developed a lab policy for for AI use in their biomedical research that they'd be willing to share? Have people even thought about defining what should be allowed/encouraged, and what should be outright banned? Please share with anyone who might have ideas.
- One thing I think I want to ban entirely is using AI-generated citations. You can't really cite something if you haven't read it yourself. And even if AI hallucinations get better, I think the risk is far too great.
- Reposted by Dan Sprockett🔬 New Perspective in mBio (@asm.org)! We call for a shift from disease surveillance to microbial stewardship, and highlight testable, cross-system hypotheses to unravel central rules of microbial life–spanning multiple scales, taxa, and environments. 🦠🌎 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
- From 2 of my favorite scientists: “We are deeply concerned about the current funding climate. When we think about new professors or postdocs starting their own labs, we worry that funding challenges could easily result in losing a generation of talented scientists.” news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...
- Reposted by Dan SprockettDo people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]
- This is exciting! Top reporting on Science, Biotech, Health Policy, and Public Health news. Wake Forest University School of Medicine affiliates can access @statnews.com for the next 2 weeks! Visit www.statnews.com/register/ & enter a valid @wakehealth.edu email address @wakeforest.bsky.social
- WOW -- this is awesome:
- Stealth plasmids: rapid evolution of deleted plasmids can displace antibiotic resistance plasmids under selection for horizontal transmission. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- "...creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized."
- Are Microbiomes Contagious? Check out this awesome video on the social #microbiome. asm.org/Videos/Are-M... @asm.org
- This is such a cool finding...
- Thrilled to share my postdoctoral work with @microbiome.bsky.social on BioRxiv. Ever wonder why you got a fever after your booster shot, but your friend didn’t? We find that both diet and the gut microbiome are associated with risk of fever after vaccination (1/4). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- I’m excited to share that I’ll be starting a new position as an Assistant Professor at @wakeforest.bsky.social School of Medicine! The Sprockett Lab will focus on understanding the assembly, transmission, and evolution of the microbiome, and how these forces impact host health and physiology.
- Reposted by Dan SprockettOur review is out in Nature Reviews Genetics! rdcu.be/d5AY2 We show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets. These methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit. @lauriebelch.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social
