COLIMIND: Synthetic biology-enabled sensing and typing of stressed coliforms in drinking water PhD
About the Project
This exciting fully funded PhD, with an enhanced stipend of £31,805 per annum (with fees covered) through the EPSRC TechExpert Pilot scheme, is sponsored by the NERC Doctoral Focal Award in Engineering Biology for Environmental Applications (EngBio4Env) and the Water Research Centre (WRc). This project addresses the challenge of interpreting intermittent coliform detections in drinking water systems, where positive results can arise from multiple biological and operational causes. It combines microbiology, genomics, proteomics, and AI-driven analysis to distinguish between true treatment failures, environmental ingress, and stress-induced recovery of bacteria. The goal is to improve understanding of bacterial survival in water systems and develop tools that support faster, more reliable decision-making for utilities.
Safe and resilient drinking-water supplies depend on understanding how bacteria respond to treatment and persist within complex infrastructure. Coliforms are important warning organisms, but a positive result does not reveal whether bacteria survived disinfection, entered through a network fault, regrew within a biofilm or recovered after sub-lethal stress. Resolving this uncertainty is a timely challenge at the intersection of public-health microbiology, water engineering, engineering biology and data science.
This PhD will develop an engineering-biology-enabled approach to classify stressed coliforms and support rapid incident triage. The student will combine controlled stress-and-recovery experiments with MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, genome and plasmid sequencing, and interpretable machine learning to identify markers of injury, persistence and recovery. The most informative markers will be used to create a validated decision-support framework and a contained cell-free proof-of-concept biosensor for WRc and water-sector laboratories.
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