Researcher in genomic medicine, statistics and big data. @lachlanjmc@genomic.social @lachlanjmc@bsky.social

Joined July 2009
Lachlan Coin retweeted
ABC investigation reveals universities spent $1.8 billion on private consultants in 1 year. Australia’s universities are becoming increasingly corporatised by the corrosive influence of consultants. Corporate executives and consultants are running our universities like banks.
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Lachlan Coin retweeted
A good news story for you this morning featuring #genomics, #RNA, #vaccines And #AI Tech entrepreneur creates personalised cancer vaccine for dog Rosie theaustralian.com.au/busines… via @australian
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The science funding system is BROKEN. PhDs and professors are spending their days writing grant proposals rather than conducting research that could transform millions of lives. And the worst part? The system REWARDS predictable, safe, incremental science. It PUNISHES radical ideas and moonshots.
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Lachlan Coin retweeted
As an alternative to the h-index, I made the Mentorship Index (M-index) to proxy a scientist's contribution to mentoring junior scientists. M10-index = # last-author pubs where the first author had < 10 pubs. Calculate yours: jef.works/Mentorship-Index/ 🧵👇
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Lachlan Coin retweeted
Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations I don't think people realize how bad the slop is right now It's not just that researchers from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @MIT, @Cambridge_Uni are using AI - they allowed LLMs to generate hallucinations in their papers and didn't notice at all. It's insane that these made it through peer review👇
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Our method for genome size estimation from long-read overlaps is now published : academic.oup.com/bioinformat… Shout out to Chenxi Zhou for scaling the approach from bacterial sized genomes to human sized genomes!
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Heard of SDSE? This under-recognised strep bacterium is causing a growing number of serious infections in Australia, with First Nations Australians disproportionately affected. Learn more 🔗 bit.ly/3KDYy6r @ouli_xie @syctong @MDaviesLab
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Please read the next S. pyogenes genomic epi instalment from the laboratory (thread below). Huge amount of work by 'Dr Dr' @ouli_xie. Many thanks to the multitude of collaborators who contributed to this important work.
Excited to share our latest research published in @LancetMicrobe exploring epidemiology and lineage dynamics of invasive S. pyogenes across diverse regions of Australia. doi.org/10.1016/j.lanmic.202…. A huge collaboration with many partners @syctong @MDaviesLab @rh_chisholm. 🧵👇
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Before 2020, most of the AI field was open and collaborative. For me, that was the key factor that accelerated scientific progress and made the impossible possible—just look at the “T” in ChatGPT, which comes from the Transformer architecture openly shared by Google. Then came the myth that weights were too dangerous to share, and companies started optimizing for short-term revenue. That led most major AI labs, scientists and developers to stop sharing and collaborating. With @sama @OpenAI now saying they're willing to share open weights again, we have a real chance to return to a golden age of AI progress and democratization—powered by openness and collaboration, in the US and around the world. This is incredibly exciting. Let’s go, open science and open-source AI!
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Imp. long read. Key elements of highly pathogenic H5N1 incl: 1. It’s already a major ‘pandemic’ of birds with big impact, (2) it’s adapting to mammals, (3) it’s not yet in Oz, (4) we need robust pandemic preparedness, including clean indoor air strategies abc.net.au/news/2025-03-30/n…
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Lachlan Coin retweeted
📢📷 I am recruiting PhD students passionate about AI for Biomedical Science to join our ABI Lab at @SAiGENCI. Topics include, but are not limited to: (1) AIDD; (2) Multiomics; (3) Structural bioinformatics. Interested in working together? Please contact me soon! #PhDposition
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The Global Indigenous Data Sovereignty Conference 2025 website is live! 🌐✨ Be a part of a movement to redefine Indigenous data rights and protect our cultural and intellectual property. Join us 31 March – 3 April 2025. 👉 au.entegy.events/gidsov/ #GIDSov2025 #GIDSov2025
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Lachlan Coin retweeted
Exciting news! ASM is partnering with @IDSAInfo to launch an annual conference on #AMR. This landmark event will unite experts from academia & industry to collaborate and respond to the urgent need for novel antimicrobial solutions. Read the announcement: asm.social/2e4
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Latest preprint from the lab: we asked whether native RNA sequencing might be a successor to traditional cDNA sequencing for biomarker discovery in blood.
Utilising Nanopore direct RNA sequencing of blood from patients with sepsis for discovery of co- and post-transcriptional disease biomarkers medrxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #medRxiv
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Thanks to all the co-authors including @DevikaGanes @jess_sci_chang @DrKGibbons and many others not on twitter
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I should add that we decided to not report RNA modifications in this preprint as we use outdated R9.4 chemistry, and there are many modifications and many tools, which often given conflicting results. But this is also an exciting area for biomarker discovery.
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