Supervisors: Luke McNally, Teuta Pilizota
Project Description:
Evolutionary enabled changes in characteristics of living organisms across scales drive life’s adoptability to a diverse and ever changing external environment. But, what are the ‘laws’ that govern these changes? A central concept that has emerged in the last decade at the interface of ecology and evolution is that of evolutionary rescue; where de novo genetic change helps avoid the extinction of the population (1-3). This theory has become central to our understanding of how populations respond to environmental change by combining ecological and evolutionary dynamics. The theory of evolutionary rescue has been applied to as diverse stresses as climate change and antibiotic treatment, where experiments with microbes have proved hugely useful in elucidating the principles underlying evolutionary rescue. However, while the role of spatio-temporal change in probability of evolutionary rescue has been explored theoretically, experimentally it has proved hard to access. For example, it is predicted that there is an upper limit on the speed at which refugia can move in space for evolutionary rescue to still occur (4). The prediction lacks experimental confirmation, as quick and highly controlled changes in the external environment are not easy to achieve. Yet, confirming such limit is critical in allowing us to predict whether populations will survive environmental change.
In this project you will use tools of synthetic biology and biological physics to achieve full control of spatio-temporal changes in the environment and probe the relationship between the frequency and intensity of environmental change, refugia occurrence and the probability of evolutionary rescue using a bacterial model system. Specifically, you will use a microscopy setup with spatial light modulators to illuminate defined patterns with specific wavelengths of light, much in a similar way as we have used previously to control the speed of bacterial swimming (5). Lower wavelengths of visible light will be damaging to bacterial cells, while green and red wavelengths of light will be beneficial for synthetically engineered strains of microbes already available in Pilizota and McNally groups. You will use this fast and precise environmental control to examine how the occurrence of refugia and their interaction with the rate of environmental change determines the probability of evolutionary rescue. This project will provide a new fundamental underpinning to help us predict whether organisms can evolve to survive changes in their environment from climate change to antibiotic treatment, and you will have the opportunity to gain interdisciplinary skills in synthetic biology, physics, evolutionary biology and mathematical modelling.
We encourage candidates with evolutionary biology (or related biological discipline), applied mathematics, and physics (biological physics) degrees who are open to an interdisciplinary adventure to apply.
References:
(1) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11879
(2) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6035/1327
(3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19659574
(4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538449/
(5) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03161-8
If you wish to apply for this project, please go to this link.
