COVID-19 has reinforced the importance of staff and personal wellbeing. Laboratory staff work predominantly onsite, and due to the nature of their work, bioinformaticians can work from home. The LSHTM group has a workplace lunch every Friday at the end of the month, to gather the entire team (or as much as possible) and just enjoy each other's company with strictly no work talk allowed! This month we went to Phoenix Palace, which has great food. We look forward to the next team lunch day next month and welcoming new additions to the team.

Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kp) Gram-negative bacteria cause nosocomial infections and rapidly acquire antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which makes it a global threat to human health. It also has a comparatively rare hypervirulent phenotype that can lead to severe disease in otherwise healthy individuals. In recent work by Anton et al., involving 13k publicly available sequenced Kp isolates and 2k hypervirulent strains, we analyzed the plasmid replicons and carbapenemase and siderophore encoding genes to understand the movement of hypervirulence and AMR genes located on plasmids. The large-scale analysis reveals outbreaks and movement of hypervirulent strains, including in China.

Our Infectious Disease ‘omics course was hosted by the Royal Veterinary College, with many participants online. The Alan Turing Institute sponsored RVC places on the course. Specifically, this course offers hands-on experience of processing sequencing data to construct genomes, identifying genomic variants and applying downstream methods, such as phylogenetics.