Ninety papers a week. That’s roughly what the search behind this site’s feed turns up; more than 23,000 papers in total, seven in ten of them published since 2021, signalling a field in its exponential growth phase.

~90
papers a week
23,000+
records matched
70%
of them since 2021

We built this as a resource: to categorise and comment on the latest from the world of microbial sequencing. By the scientist, for the scientist, and for the benefit of downstream users, clinicians and patients. In that spirit, we are welcoming contributions, so please get in touch if you have something to add.

Disclosure

WGS Pulse is edited by Will Hendy, an HCPC-registered Biomedical Scientist specialising in microbiology. He is also a co-founder of BaseTrack Limited, an Irish company building diagnostic sequencing software and workflows for clinical microbiology.

We will not use this site to comment on or promote BaseTrack, or any other commercial product, except where it is an important part of a genuine contribution to the field.

What this is for

Sequencing is slowly but surely making its way to diagnostic microbiology, starting with reference and surveillance laboratories where the technology has now become routine. The machines are cheap enough. The chemistry works. The claims are piling up. What hasn’t kept up is the messy business of working out exactly which of those claims a laboratory should actually act on.

The feed is automated. A single PubMed query, applied the same way to every result. Nothing is added or dropped by hand. What that query covers is a judgement call, and it does get revised; the query itself, including everything it throws out, is available on request.
Curated papers get read before they get written about. Every number in a curated entry comes from that paper’s own abstract. Every DOI is checked to confirm it resolves to that paper, not merely that it resolves to something.

Scope

For now, clinical microbiology and One Health: bacteriology, virology, mycology and parasitology, plus zoonotic and food-chain work where it bears on human infection.

The test is what a paper is about. A study of human infection that traces the source back to livestock, a foodstuff or a hospital water system belongs here. One whose title announces the animal or the food as its subject (resistance in retail chicken, the genomics of cattle mastitis) does not, however similar the methods. That line gets drawn by the query rather than by hand, which means it gets drawn bluntly: it reads titles, not papers, and now and then it will throw out something it should have kept, or list something irrelevant.

Sequencing isn’t confined to clinical work and our scope may widen. But it will widen only if we have something useful to say, not to look comprehensive.

Following it

All of it comes out as an RSS feed at /feed.xml: the automated items, the curated entries and pieces like this one, in one list. No newsletter, no account to make.

Contributions

We welcome corrections and will make them in the open, and we would rather hear about a mistake than leave it standing. Suggestions of papers worth curating are just as welcome, as are pieces from people doing this work, both theoretical and practical.

editor@wgs.ie

Figures measured 2 September 2026 · Back to the feed