Gytis Dudas
PI @ Vilnius University Life Sciences Center 🦠🧬🌳🌍🐾📈.
Enthusiast of orthomyxos (& other (-)ssRNA viruses), RNA virus discovery, evolution & ecology, genomic epidemiology, data-vis, matplotlib.
EMBO installation grantee.
evogytis.github.io
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasTake time to focus on your interpersonal skills, discover tools to support your development and tune up your interpersonal and communication skills at the @embo.org Lab Leadership course for #Postdocs: 10 - 12 March 2026. Places still available: www.embolableadership.org/course/embol... #EMBOLabLead
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasOur paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage
- Reposted by Gytis DudasReally excited our paper about how H5N1 rapidly adapted to cattle (and how these adaptations also increased its ability to infect cells from the human respiratory tract) is now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Gytis DudasOur paper on the Genomic Epidemiology of DENV2/3 in Colombia and the Americas is finally out @cp-cellreports.bsky.social, check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Big thanks to my collaborators @lambod50.bsky.social, @viralverity.bsky.social, @nathangrubaugh.bsky.social, and many others!
- It’s my pleasure to share our new preprint, which I had the opportunity to lead, and which has been in the making since 2022. In this work, we used climate data, phylogeography, and antigenic profiling to uncover the dynamics of DENV spread in Colombia. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasTerrific origin story, history, and future of bioRxiv and medRxiv by @richardsever.bsky.social in @mbio.bsky.social journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
- Reposted by Gytis Dudas✨Africa CDC shuts down RFK's attempt to conduct a Tuskegee-like vaccine trial on children in Guinea-Bissau. The study exploited “the scarcity of a proven beneficial vaccine in a context where that vaccine is needed,” said Boghuma Titanji. @melodyschreiber.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasCome join my group as a postdoc on a fun wildepi.ca project looking at the evolution of endemic alpha- and betacoronaviruses in Canadian wildlife. Computational work will inform concurrent experimental work in the @banerjeelab.ca and @smubareka.bsky.social groups! bioinformatics.ca/jobs/postdoc...
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasCheck out our new print that combines dense sequencing and phylodynamics to uncover a bunch of 😎 things about an understudied virus. - Doesn't evolve for 10 months a year ✅ - Uses some mossies for maintenance, others for spread ✅ - Established in Northeast for ~300 years ✅
- 🦟📄 New preprint! Our first large-scale phylodynamic study of Jamestown Canyon virus (JCV) reveals how mosquito ecology shapes the evolution, persistence, and spread of this understudied arbovirus in North America. Read it here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Gytis Dudas🦟📄 New preprint! Our first large-scale phylodynamic study of Jamestown Canyon virus (JCV) reveals how mosquito ecology shapes the evolution, persistence, and spread of this understudied arbovirus in North America. Read it here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Gytis DudasI am very glad to share the preprint for our latest study on the 2024-2025 chikungunya virus outbreak on Réunion island, with primary data produced thanks to the massive efforts performed by Marie-C Jaffar and Etienne Frumence and analyses led by Simon Dellicour. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasWe've a computational PhD project available AI-DRIVEN DISCOVERY OF VIRUS–HOST MOLECULAR INTERACTIONS www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl... as part of the University of Glasgow's MVLS Futures Themes PhD Programme. Deadline for applications is this Monday, 12th Jan 2026. Please apply!
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- This isn't in international media yet but Lithuania is in crisis. The ruling coalition is trying to seize control of our public broadcaster LRT using expedited parliamentary procedures. European & Venice Commissions are aware & we've been protesting for the last two weeks. Things are looking grim.
- The ruling coalition of social democrats & antisemitic/pro-kremlin party want this done so fast they approved the opposition's fillibuster addendum that LRT's director can only be fired before their term runs out if one particular **cat** issues a motion of no confidence. We need attention on this.
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasExcellent news:
- Reposted by Gytis DudasAmazing example of influenza cheat/cooperator cycles in this recent paper - the repeatability of the oscillatory cycles is so striking Congrats to @alnajifg.bsky.social , @christopherbrooke.bsky.social , @vignuzzilab.bsky.social & friends www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧪 #socialviruses
- Reposted by Gytis Dudas"The hyperreal bat: more vivid, more coherent, and more narratively satisfying than any bat in nature." Why does the idea of bats as special viral reservoirs endure? New Substack post: robertjgifford.substack.com/p/bats-and-v...
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasGuess the news is officially out! Extremely excited to announce that I will be starting my own laboratory at Institut Pasteur @pasteur.fr this coming spring! Slight change to my office window view from Tokyo Tower🗼 to the Tour Eiffel. 🇫🇷
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- Talking about RNA viruses escaping from labs in the scientific community is not controversial per se *when there is evidence of it* & the burden of proof is not that high.
- Reposted by Gytis DudasUpdate on the wild #polio discovery in Germany: The virus was found in wastewater in Hamburg. @rki.de, the German public health agency, says the virus sequence is very similar to some isolated in Afghanistan, so the likely source was an infected human. (page 10 here: www.rki.de/DE/Aktuelles...)
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasOur lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Gytis DudasMy 1st first-author paper is out as a preprint! Excited to share the fascinating story of marine-feeding vampire bats 🌊🦇 We found that marine-diet bats were exposed to #H5#AvianFlu 🦠 from marine wildlife and could potentially spread it to livestock via blood feed🩸 doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.09.686930
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- Galbut (technically Galbūt) virus is Darren's discovery child named in Lithuanian (together with Chaq, a Klingon-named satellite of Galbūt) that turned out to be the most common RNA virus of Drosophila melanogaster. I'm loving the emerging "genomic epi, but like in insects" chapter of metagenomics!
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasIf you are looking for a PhD in the UK, please check out the LIDo program - www.lido-dtp.ac.uk/apply. If you are interested in viruses and making genetically edited salmon, please look up my icase project. International students are welcome to apply! Please reach out if you have questions.
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasOur new preprint is out 🥳🥳🥳 Henipaviruses, like Nipah and Hendra, package their genomes inside helical shells built by thousands of nucleoproteins. These nucleocapsids are essential to protect the viral RNA, but how do they ever let the polymerase in to read the sequence? 👇
- Reposted by Gytis DudasSad day for the folks who staked their reputations on lab leak conspiracy theories. www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...
- Reposted by Gytis DudasExcited to announce the final version of the Mosquito Cell Atlas is out now in @cellpress.bsky.social!! 🦟🩸 There is SO much left to find & investigate in this dataset (& the rich biology of the Aedes aegypti mosquito)! We hope this helps scientists in many fields! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
- Reposted by Gytis DudasAs expected, unfortunately. If ever you needed a reason for never using GISAID ever again (as a data producer or data user - we're both), look no further. Time to move on to more trusted and transparent solutions.
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasMy paper is out! Uncovering hundreds of exogenous and endogenous RNA viral RdRp sequences amongst uncharacterised sequences in public protein databases. doi.org/10.1093/ve/v... 💻🧬 1/5 🧵
- Just to add - after the molecular clock anomaly of the 2014 Lomela EBOV outbreak in DRC I wondered if @arambaut.bsky.social & I got the West African/Makona EBOV epidemic root wrong. Very happy to see JT McCrone correct the record (or at least get closer to the truth).
- Our paper on the phenomenon of persistence and latency in Ebola virus in an unobserved reservoir is finally out in preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Gytis DudasOur paper on the phenomenon of persistence and latency in Ebola virus in an unobserved reservoir is finally out in preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- Reposted by Gytis DudasAnd now NextStrain as well. Next up, will GISAID start charging open-source community tools to have access? That would completely shaft users who contributed to GISAID, where we never agreed to that and assumed GISAID would be good custodians of the data we contributed. They're not.
- You might be wondering why we haven't updated outbreak.info for months. Well, the reason is that GISAID cut our access in January - as they did others. Without telling us. After a ♾️ back and forth, that is now permanent. More on that soon - and why GISAID should not be trusted with critical data.
- Reposted by Gytis DudasTanja Stadler @tanjastadler.bsky.social @ethz.ch awarded prestigious #DoronPrize for pioneering work in computational evolution and public health. Big congrats, Tanja! > u.ethz.ch/IxSY8
