Rob Fagan

Starting the day with news of a fire in our office early this morning. Thankfully no one hurt and no lasting damage but an unpleasant start to the day!

LMB PhD studentship available in the Baum lab to use informatics to infer cell structure from genomic data in collaboration with the brilliant Tom Williams. If you write to me and I don’t reply - try again - the spam filter is hungry…

Oh god, what's he said now?

Yellow Labrador puppy Pip in the woods looking into a small stream flowing down a steep hill. The steam is actually artificial, the last remaining sign of a mill today used to stand on this site

A close up of Pip's face - she looks very happy

Pip fast asleep on our couch

Making the most of a few days off before I have to get back to the day job! I think I've finally found the puppy's limit

Very but she had a swim before we headed home. She's just gone out again with her brother though so we'll see what state she comes home in!

Pip asleep on a brown couch

Mission accomplished!

A shallow river running through a forest. A yellow Labrador puppy is just about visible, having just come out of the water

Pip, a yellow Labrador puppy, standing on a rocky path through the forest. She is looking expectantly at the camera waiting for a treat

Pip resting her chin on a rough cut stone wall with a small waterfall in the background

There are definite benefits to living on the edge of the Peak District. 5 min walk from our front door we reach the edge of the woods and after that the only limit is my legs. Today's mission was to clear my head and tire out the puppy

Having a few days off to recover from a really full on summer & to get some DIY jobs done so we can sell our house. Was all going well until I got the carpet cleaner out. Managed to do half of one room before the magic white smoke escaped. Now two upset dogs and all the windows open. House stinks 😩

Oh yes, been there, smelled that! And four day dead frog, dead squirrel and, on one unpleasant occasion, human faeces...

Thankfully not - just mud. So much mud. She was out for a walk today with her brother and he's a bad influence!

A close up photo of a very dirty Labrador puppy's face. She is a 7 month old yellow lab - although covered in mud so her coat looks darker

Sigh...

Would love to get some feedback. Just finalising a few bits a pieces to add at the moment

Very kind of you to say!

Willing to join us @pasteur.fr for a PhD for a project on how interactions between mobile genetic elements shape bacterial adaptation? Subject to be tailored to candidates with keen interest in evolution, genomics, computational biology, microbiology. Check www.pasteur.fr/en/education...

👏👏👏 👏👏

Mr4 pudding with his new Lego police car

Final product!

Mr4, in a green and white horizontal stripey t-shirt, sitting at a low wooden table, looking at the instruction book for a Lego police car. The Lego pieces are spread out on the table in front of him

Saturday morning Lego fun with Mr4!

Selfie of Rob and Pip. Pip is a 7 month old yellow Labrador puppy

I don't think I'm going to be allowed to move from this spot for a while

A view of the Eiffel Tower at night taken from a boat on the river Seine. The tower is brightly lit gold and a search light extends from the top

Our French hosts really outdid themselves with the venue for last night's #ClostPath2025 congress dinner. A fantastic night, a fantastic week of science and now just two years to wait to do it all again in Rio

Looking back at a great #clostpath2025, and ahead to #icds2026 (Bled) and #clostpath2027 (Rio de Janeiro).

Delighted to see some excellent work on C. diff vancomycin resistance at ClostPath. The evidence for emerging resistance is mounting and it's becoming clear that even fairly low level resistance causes treatment failure

@lilia-elle.bsky.social, @funnirudh.bsky.social and Rob somewhere in Paris

Lab on tour - the wonderful #ClostPath2025 organisers have arranged great walking tours. Guess where we are?

YouTube video by Edwin Hayward The Death of Labour's Soul (August 2025)

Our RW media are sharks. Labour spent the summer feeding them buckets of raw chum.

76 anti-immigration tweets in August 2025 from Starmer's Twitter account, the Home Office, and the official Number 10 account.

I compiled them all into a 10-minute Youtube video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=naaj...

net immigration fell by more than half last year and the politics has gone in the complete opposite direction. It's not really about the numbers

On the RER in Paris - remarkably smooth journey

I'm tempting fate here but the transpennine express hasn't let me down yet - first stage of journey to #ClostPath2025 underway

@lilia-elle.bsky.social‬ in our PhD student office holding up her freshly printed poster - describing some of her work on the C. difficile stringent response

The posters are done so we're officially ready for #ClostPath2025 @pasteur.fr next week. Now all I have to do is submit a programme grant and 3 PhD studentship applications and I'll be good to go too!

Selfie of Rob and Mr4 with the sea in the background and, about 100m away, a coastal town just visible

Selfie of Rob and Ms7 with the rigging of a ship in the background against a grey sky

Greetings from the (not at all sunny) Yorkshire coast!

Interestingly, the vnrRS genes only seem to be present in epidemic ribotype 027 and 176 strains where their normal role seems to be control of flagellar gene expression

Identification of pathways to high-level vancomycin resistance in Clostridioides difficile that incur high fitness costs in key pathogenicity traits Clostridioides difficile is a human pathogen primarily treated with the antibiotic vancomycin. High-level vancomycin resistance is a serious problem in other pathogens, not yet for C. difficile. This ...

This mechanism works synergistically with the DacJRS system we characterised in our last paper to confer high level resistance