Metavenom paper is a huge success

The metavenom paper has garnered a lot of attention!

With an Altmetric of over 1600, the metavenom paper now stands in the 99th percentile of all research Altmetric has ever tracked.

The conservation of the metavenom between mammals and snakes has lead to many sensationalised headlines on how humans can one day become venomous. While highly unlikely, the fact that many molecular components are shared between mammals and reptiles does call for further investigation into the origins of specialisations from common building blocks.

A few more nuanced articles are:

Live Science
The Print
OIST press release

Another highlight was a recommendation on Faculty Opinions by Rafael Zardoya, Diego San Mauro, and Iker Irisarri. They described our approach as “novel and elegant.”

Perhaps the most valuable mention of our research was when the Understanding Evolution Blog from Berekely used our paper as a resource to teach convergence and homology. This was special for me because, as an undergrad, I used to read these blogs pretty often and was a source of inspiration.