Leighton Pritchard

@widdowquinn

Computational biologist. Views/opinions mine, not my employer's. Repost != agreement. Not green, just pleasant. Fabian. =﹥÷ I can’t see DMs because of the Online Safety Act.

727 Following1,353 Followers734 Posts

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Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· 6d

Formative material

A scene from a 1970s Ladybird book. The image shows a goat stitching up a wolf’s stomach while caterpillars are mushrooms together. The text reads “Thenmother goat placed as many of the stones as she could inside the wolf’s stomach. Then she quickly sewed it together again”

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· 6d

Moving boxes around. Amazing how many memories they can hold. #doctorwho

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· 12d

Where the actual FUCK do BBC News think Edinburgh is? That's Ecclefechan, you bams.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· 17d

Sure BBC News, "Standford" University. Why not? About as accurate as your claim in the piece that this is the "first time we've designed biology on a computer." FFS…

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· 18d

Taxonomy is straightforward. It's agreeing which taxonomy to use that seems to cause the arguments.

The Mexican Standoff scene from Reservoir Dogs. Four men are in a warehouse. Three are standing, pointing guns at each other. Another bleeds out on the floor. The three standing men are labelled "Taxonomists," "ICNP," and "Bioinformaticians." The man on the floor is labelled "Microbiologists."

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jul 11

Not necessarily a typo…

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jun 5

Sure, add an additional step of me having to actively click on a link and open a browser to get exactly the same valuable/worthless information I could have scrolled through in the email. I'm never clicking that link.

Email fragment reading "But rather than filling your inbox with another long read, we're doing things differently. This month's highlights, insights, and opportunities are waiting for you in one place - streamlined, skimmable, and easy to explore."

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· May 13

The co-evolving sets vary across lineage (there's a Dickeya/Pectobacterium distinction, for instance), and we find CAZy classes differentially associated with woody and soft tissue-targeting pathogens. 2/

A complex diagram showing relationships between plant-pathogenic bacteria and co-evolving enzyme groups. It presents as a set of concentric circles, with an outer grey circle of labels, and inner red, blue, and yellow arcs indicating the presence and absence of CAZy classes, distributed about a central cicrular phylogenetic tree. The tree is also coloured to indicate the several phylogenetic groups it represents.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· May 11

Duabi! Tied with "they have some kind of specialist unit for that sort of thing" on Radio 4's Today as this morning's reminder from the BBC that no-one's perfect ;)

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Apr 23

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Apr 15

Tori Amos at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, tonight. Bliss - literally, as it was in the setlist.

Tori Amos and band, performing at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 15th April 2026.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Apr 13

I’ll be at poster A038 at #microbio26 - why not pop by for some stickers and bioinformatics chat?

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Mar 28

Turned out they had none.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Mar 26

GitHub will be allowing Copilot to use your code for training its models, unless you opt out. Seems like the sort of thing some people might want to opt out of…

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Mar 12

Wait, what now?

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Mar 1

Three individuals with heads that are pie charts. The heads on the left hold the same two categories, the head on the right holds those categories and a small slice of a third category. One of the individuals on the left says "<third category>? You're a terrible person…" and the shouting continues. The proportion of the third category in the individual on the right increases in size. The proportion of the third category in the persion who's not shouting also increases.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Feb 18

"UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is streamlining its research translation and commercialisation funding opportunities to make it clearer and more consistent. This update affects only the naming of UKRI funding opportunities and not existing remits, funding modes and processes."

Anime meme of a man wearing glasses indicating a butterfly and asking "is this streamlining?"

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jan 29

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jan 28

Spelling Bee is trolling Brits.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jan 21

A screengrab of the Spitting Image TV series section: "The President's Brain Is Missing." Puppets of Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, Nancy Reagan, and a chimpanzee are present. A red arrow points to a very small brain, making its escape.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jan 10

This Greg Bovino? The one dressed like a Mr Benn they had to take out of rotation for… reasons…

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jan 10

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jan 5

FIFA have already gifted him one… edition.cnn.com/2025/03/16/p...

A tackily-decorated desktop in Trump's Oval Office, with garish gold trinkets that include a replica of the Football World Cup, some photos in frames, and a US flag in the background.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Dec 29

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice In Chains.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Aug 26

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Aug 12

Challenge: post your last photo taken in DC to show what a hell-hole it is.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jul 30

Just turned up to post this and say how much I appreciate that preventing people from listening to music without passing personal information to a third party <checks notes> will keep children safe from predation.

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jul 29

I’d DM you my thoughts, but…

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jul 29

Heh, apparently if you're in the UK you need to verify your age to DM your friends and colleagues (or anyone else)… I feel 1,000,000% safer! #OnlineSafetyAct

Leighton Pritchard@widdowquinn· Jul 23

I have poster D-094 at #ISMBECCB2025 - if you’re interested in OGRI/ANI methods, I’m happy to chat (or not, if you prefer ;)) #pyani #genomerxiv #bioinformatics