Supervisors: Ildiko ML Somorjai (see also here), Andrew Free
Project Description:
The gut microbiota - the complex community of bacteria, viruses and archaea with which we live - has an important impact on health, disease progression, lifespan and behaviour (Glendinning and Free 2014). It may even be a driver of co-evolutionary change (McFall-Ngai et al 2013). How does the microbiota mediate these effects in the host? Do the impacts of environment-mediated change in the microbiota go beyond the parental generation to the next? These questions are best addressed in biological systems in which you can manipulate microbiotas, with rapid generation times and large numbers of offspring, with genomic resources and which are not too distant from wild populations. Amphioxus, a marine invertebrate chordate, is the ideal model for such studies. It has close evolutionary ties with vertebrate systems, but simpler genome architecture and anatomy. It is emerging as an important model for developmental biology, regeneration and ageing research (Somorjai 2017).
During your PhD, you will characterise both environmental and gut microbiotas under several conditions in adult amphioxus using 16S rRNA gene metataxonomics, You will identify gene expression changes in these animals using RNA-seq, and evaluate the impact of microbiota change on development of embryos, from egg to larval stages. This research will help elucidate how the environment (microbiome) -independent of the parent genotype - can affect important developmental traits in the next generation. In future, this may permit engineering of microbiota and selection of host-microbiome associations to improve animal and human health.
This project will provide interdisciplinary training in cutting edge next generation sequencing technologies, bioinformatics analysis, developmental biology, microbiology, molecular biology, microscopy and imaging. The successful candidate will benefit from the specialised training afforded by the Eastbio PhD programme, as well as career and personal developmental opportunities at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh.
Please see the Somorjai and Free lab profiles for a good overview of our research.
Selected reading:
McFall-Ngai et al (2013) Animals in a bacterial world, a new imperative for the life sciences. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 110: 3229-36.
Somorjai IML (2018) Amphioxus regeneration: evolutionary and biomedical implications. Int. J. Dev. Biol. 61: 689-696.
Glendinning L & Free A (2014) Supra-organismal interactions in the human intestine. Front Cell Infect Microbiol 4: 47.
To apply for this project, please go to this link.
