Willem van Schaik
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wvschaik.bsky.social
Willem van Schaik
@wvschaik.bsky.social
6.9K followers 1K following 2.7K posts
Microbiology, microbiome, antimicrobial resistance. Sometimes UK politics. Head of Research of the School of Infection, Inflammation and Immunology, University of Birmingham. Also Co-Director of @target-amr.bsky.social.
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wvschaik.bsky.social
Post a movie where you're from
A black and white of a bridge and a canal. There is a boat in the canal with a music band in it. On shore, there is an open truck with another music band on it.
November 23, 2025 at 9:46 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Did anyone here watch the Hitler documentary on Channel 4 yesterday, and was it as bad and misguided as outlined here?

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
At the very heart of the Nazis’ so-called “race science” was the idea that our blood is where our destiny lies. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that purity of the blood is what enables individuals to make “correct” decisions and bonds a nation together, and its contamination through racial mixing is what causes individuals to act “incoherently” and leads civilisations to their doom. The most troubling thing about Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is that those involved in making it may have read these passages carefully then continued to make the programme in the way they did anyway.
November 16, 2025 at 8:35 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Absolutely delighted (and proud) that @freyaallen.bsky.social passed her viva with minor corrections today.

Thanks very much @jessicamablair.bsky.social @robfagan.bsky.social for examining!
From left to right: Willem, Freya, Jess and Rob. We are standing in front of a wall with a congratulations banner and some left-over Halloween decorations.
November 6, 2025 at 10:09 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Not a great day for sewage overflows in the South-East

via www.sewagemap.co.uk
A map of the Midlands and the South of England, with sewage overflow events indicated by poo emojis. The South East of England is covered in poo emojis. The rest of England is mostly green, with some poo emojis in the South West and across the Midlands
October 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
We had the in-person meeting of the @target-amr.bsky.social leadership team today.

We have some great plans for AMR genomics for the next year (and beyond), so follow us for updates!
From left to right: Rivie Mayele-Tamina, Tess Johnson, Paul Flowers, Nikki Adderley, Steph Johnson, Kate Baker and me. We are standing in front of a large 1930s yellow-brick building.
October 13, 2025 at 10:38 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Has anyone already done the work-kitchen sponge microbiome project?
A dirty and worn sponge on a sink.
September 26, 2025 at 11:50 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Come on @theguardian.com!

Wrong, incorrect, irresponsible. Not contentious.
Headline in the Guardian. Trump warns pregnant women not to take paracetamol making contentious autism claim.
September 23, 2025 at 7:42 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Mind blown
The University of Nottingham traces its origins to both the founding of an adult education school in 1798, and the University Extension Lectures inaugurated by the University of Cambridge in 1873—the first of their kind in the country.[10] However, the foundation of the university is generally regarded as being the establishment of University College Nottingham, in 1881 as a college preparing students for examinations of the University of London.
September 10, 2025 at 9:03 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
My plans to start a new university in Dorset have run into significant economic headwinds, but I am confident that the business case is solid
A screenshot of Google Maps of Oxbridge, Dorset
September 10, 2025 at 8:32 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Got this amazing book yesterday, and watched 'I am Martin Parr' on iPlayer this evening. Highly recommended!
A photo of a book cover Utterly Lazy and Inattentive Martin Parr in Words and Pictures Martin Parr Wendy Jones
September 5, 2025 at 10:15 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Excusez-moi?
A walking tour of Le Puy de Peyre Arse
August 25, 2025 at 7:08 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
🇫🇷 View for the next week.
A view of a hilly landscape. There is a rock wall in front. The grass is yellow because of drought. The sky is an intense blue.
August 23, 2025 at 5:07 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
lol
An ad with the text 'Scientific Reports offers authors a trustworthy, highly respected home for their research'
August 11, 2025 at 8:00 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
I am not commenting on the contents of this article, but I am sure we can all agree that this is an amazing stock photo

www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/rese...
A stock photo with a man in suit and tie with a Jetsons-style head gear with a sender/receiver on it. It appears to be connected to a cardboard box with the text Money Maker
July 31, 2025 at 7:55 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Had a great lunch today at @unibirmingham.bsky.social's Winterbourne Gardens with Rivie and Kev, the brilliant @target-amr.bsky.social admin team.

I am also terrible at making selfies.
A selfie of three people, all smiling, having lunch in front of a red-brick building
July 30, 2025 at 4:03 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
U of Warwick is a great uni but this makes it sound like they are doing a Stranger Things spin-off?
A screenshot of an online add for the University of Warwick The text reads: 'This is University of Warwick. This is Beyond. Our community is filled with the curious, tenacious and spirited.'
July 25, 2025 at 7:57 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Has the cartoon series Calimero been broadcast in the UK in the 1970s/1980s?

I need to know, as I want my topical jokes to be working in a British cultural context.
A cartoon blue-eyed black chick with an eggshell on their head. They are holding a knapsack on a stick. The text above the cartoon reads 'Calimero'.
July 21, 2025 at 1:44 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
No cheating. Post the last picture of your pet.
A grey cat with yellow eyes is lying in a brown cardboard box. One of his paws stretches out to the camera lens.
July 21, 2025 at 7:48 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
I guess I will be indulging in the new comfortability today then
A brown cardboard box with the text 'Indulge the New Comfortability'
July 20, 2025 at 11:06 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
Never thought I would read 'Friedrich Merz' and 'top bantz' in the same paragraph
Time for the questions. First up was Sky News’s political editor who talked and talked and talked. Almost as if she thought this was a three-way press conference with her, Starmer and Merz. Every time you thought she had come to an end, she came up with yet another long-winded question. By the third minute, Starmer was beginning to look a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps he wondered if she would ever stop. Merz, though, was a revelation. He was loving it. “Thank you for your brief questions,” he smiled. He would love to answer them all. He had nothing better to do with his life than stand around in the factory for the rest of the day. It was top bantz. His answers turned out to be a great deal shorter than the questions. Friedrich not only had a decent sense of humour, he was modest with it. He may look like a technocrat but he also has a charm that becomes more and more obvious the longer you spend in his company.
July 17, 2025 at 7:44 PM
wvschaik.bsky.social
We postulate that the emergence of the pRUM-like plasmid lineage involved an evolutionary trade-off, exchanging conjugative transfer ability for increased plasticity and access to a diverse pool of IS1216-associated genes. /6
Figure 5: Emergence and ongoing evolution of the pRUM-like lineage. Proposed model for the evolution of pRUM-like plasmids from A) pCANE to the putative intermediate structure pMOLASSES, and from pMOLASSES to pRUM. Plasmids and a translocatable unit (TU) are shown as labelled circles with IS1216 shown as a green box. A green arrow represents an IS1216-mediated copy-in cointegration event, and red lines represent IS1216-mediated deletion events. Elements are not drawn to scale. C) Overview of mechanisms contributing to the diversification of pRUM-like plasmid
July 17, 2025 at 9:02 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
We found an isolate from 1997 (in our own culture collection) that harbours an ancestor of pRUM-like plasmids, which we called pCANE (see what we did there? There is also a pCOLA in the manuscript). Interestingly, this plasmid did not contain IS1216 but contained a conjugation module /5
Figure 4: Ancestral plasmid pCANE. A) Scaled, linear maps of pRUM (R) and pCANE (C). The pRUM accessory region is shown as green boxes representing IS1216 flanking dashed grey lines that represent variable segments. In both plasmids, the positions of backbone insertions are indicated by vertical arrows labelled with the name of the inserted element. The positions of regions of the pRUM backbone with known functions are marked with labelled vertical lines. Grey shading between the plasmids represents shared sequences, with their nucleotide identities (%) shown. B) pCANE backbone segment absent from pRUM. Open reading frames are shown as horizontal arrows, with predicted functions labelled.
July 17, 2025 at 8:58 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
All pRUM-like plasmids contained at least one copy of IS1216, and this IS element has had a key role in the diversification of pRUM-like plasmids, including by facilitating cointegration of smaller plasmids in the pRUM backbone /4
Figure 3: Variation in pRUM-like plasmids. A) Schematic summary of variation detected across pRUM-like plasmids in this study. The pRUM backbone is shown as a thick black line, with the extents and orientations of backbone genes indicated by labelled arrows below. The location of the accessory region is indicated above, with the IS1216 at its boundaries shown, and the variable part of the region displayed as a set of grey dashed lines. Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and plasmid replicons (rep) found in the accessory region are listed in the dashed box below. The extents of IS1216-mediated backbone deletion events are indicated by horizontal red lines above the backbone, with each vertical red line marking the extent of an individual deletion event. Insertions in the backbone or the IS1216 at the boundaries of the accessory region are marked by blue lines, labelled with the identities of the elements involved. Backbone sequence drawn to scale from GenBank accession AF507977, with the positions of insertions and deletions determined from various plasmids listed in Table S1. B) and C) Scaled, linear maps of pRUM-like plasmids showing variation in accessory region content
July 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
We found that pRUM-like plasmids are internationally distributed and carry diverse accessory content. These plasmids are mostly associated with strains having sequence types (STs) that are associated with nosocomial infections /3
Figure 2: Overview of pRUM-like plasmid characteristics. A) Map displaying the countries of isolation for pRUM-like plasmid hosts examined here, shaded in purple. B) The number of antibiotic resistance genes (blue) and plasmid replicons (yellow) detected in pRUM-like plasmids using ResFinder and PlasmidFinder, respectively. The number of replicons includes the rep17 (pRUM) replicon that was detected in all 152 plasmids. C) The sequence type (ST) and isolation source of pRUM-like plasmid hosts.
July 17, 2025 at 8:49 AM
wvschaik.bsky.social
After a serendipitous observation on the role of an Insertion Sequence (IS1216) in the diversification of plasmids in two E. faecium genome sequences, Rob went on to characterise the role of IS1216 in the evolution of pRUM-like plasmids using 152 complete plasmid sequences /1
Figure 1: Birmingham pRUM-like plasmids pHHEf1 and pHHEf2. Scaled circular maps of plasmids pHHEf1 and pHHEf2 above a linear alignment of the two. The extents and orientations of genes are indicated by labelled arrows. Segments of different derivations are shown in different colours, with the colours maintained across the circular and linear representations of the plasmids. Insertion sequences are shown as labelled boxes with internal arrows indicating the extents and orientations of their transposase genes. Target site duplications (TSDs) generated by the actions of insertion sequences are shown as ‘lollipop’ shapes with stems coloured according to the DNA segment duplicated and circles according to the element responsible for the duplication. The sequences of TSDs are indicated in the key. The linear representations of the plasmids are opened at the first base of repA, and grey shading between the lines that represent the plasmids links shared segments with nucleotide identity >99.9%. Drawn to scale from GenBank accessions PV751131 and PV763145.
July 17, 2025 at 8:44 AM