Benjamin Minch

Are you interested in finding giant viruses, virophages, and PLVs inside your metagenomes? Struggling to figure out an easy way to do so? Look no further than BEREN, a one-stop-shop tool for recovery, taxonomy, and annotation of these viruses. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our work in collaboration with Jed Furhman lab at the USC on the temporal dynamics of marine giant viruses published in ISME communications. PhD student @Benjamin_Minch a co-first author. Please take a look! academic.oup.com/ismecommun/adv…

🦠 Now published in Bioinformatics Advances: “BEREN: A bioinformatic tool for recovering giant viruses, polinton-like viruses, and virophages in metagenomic data.”  Full article available: doi.org/10.1093/bioadv…  Authors include: @Benjamin_Minch

Excited to share our new paper introducing BEREN, a tool for identifying giant and other dsDNA viruses from metagenomic data — now online! Let BEREN help with your discovery-based reseach in viral metagenomics! academic.oup.com/bioinformatics…

Created a fun phytoplankton-themed Oregon trail style game you can play on your terminal. Check it out github.com/BenMinch/Photi…

We’re recruiting a PhD student (Fall 2026) to study the ecology & evolution of aquatic giant viruses! Research spans lab experiment, field sampling, & bioinformatics. Background in microbiology/bioinforamtics encouraged. More information: monirlab.com/join/ Please retweet!

Scientists used bespoke computer software to identify the genomes of microbes in seawater samples – including 230 giant viruses previously unknown to science. @univmiami @Benjamin_Minch sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-my…

New paper out where we highlight many newly recovered giant viruses and find new functional potential encoded in their genomes! #giantvirus #Bioinformatics nature.com/articles/s4429…

Just put together a super easy-to-use and comprehensive pipeline for calculating various genome statistics in bulk (GC, length, codon bias, TNF, complexity, N50, num genes). github.com/BenMinch/genes… #bioinformatics #genomics

🚨New @delCampoLab Preprint: A Single-cell Atlas of Coral Bleaching! 🪸🦠🔥. We show the microbial ecology of coral bleaching from the gene expression of host and symbiont cells to the shifts in the bacterial and protist communities within the holobiont! researchsquare.com/article/rs-539…

What if we could put all tailed phages in a single, evolutionarily meaningful phylogeny? Check out the latest from the Aylward Lab (twitterless) and myself - we present a phylogenomic framework toward unifying phage diversity! 🧬🤝 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

BEREN is available on my gitlab gitlab.com/benminch1/BEREN

Are you interested in finding giant viruses, virophages, and PLVs inside your metagenomes? Struggling to figure out an easy way to do so? Look no further than BEREN, a one-stop-shop tool for recovery, taxonomy, and annotation of these viruses. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

BEREN: A bioinformatic tool for recovering Giant viruses, Polinton-like Viruses, and Virophages in metagenomic data biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

@kycl4rk I have heard of it... Doesn't quite address the problem I had but a great tool for querying databases for known genes.

Couldn't find a file to easily convert from PDB (protein data bank) IDs to actual protein information so I decided to make one. Hope someone finds it useful. github.com/BenMinch/PDB-a…

It's Thursday!  Time for a new episode of #MattersMicrobial to be released!  This time, the #QualityQuorum will hear from @giant_virus about giant viruses and how they interact with their hosts.  Please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord. @ASMicrobiology youtu.be/FWutndOo9aw?si…

Our latest collaborative research on giant viruses with @JedFuhrman lab on how evolutionary history dictates the temporal succession of marine giant viruses. Preprint out! @Benjamin_Minch biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

We also highlight a stark functional divide between the two most common types of Giant virus in the ocean, possibly hinting at different infection strategies. (4/4)

Using this pipeline we discovered >230 new genomes with cool functions not found in previous Giant Viruses. (3/4)

We introduce a streamlined pipeline for the recovery of Giant Viruses from metagenomic data (github.com/BenMinch/PIGv) (2/4) #Bioinformatics

Go check out our latest preprint where we discover a bunch of new Giant Viruses encoding new functions all over the ocean. (1/4) 🧵 Expansion of the genomic and functional diversity of global ocean giant viruses biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #giantvirus