About the Project
Respiration is a near-ubiquitous bioenergetic process which uses electron transport chains (ETCs) to generate ATP, which subsequently supplied energy for the majority of cellular processes. Unlike the well conserved ETCs of mitochondria, bacteria exhibit a remarkable diversity and complexity of ETCs. This makes them attractive targets for new antibiotics as well as being central to our understanding of microbial ecology and biogeochemistry. Furthermore, engineering of bacterial ETCs is being…
utilised to create state-of-the-art sustainable biotechnologies. However, this research has been hindered by methodological limitations in characterising ETCs, especially when compared with metabolic pathways.
This PhD project will develop an electrochemical platform for analysing bacterial respiration. Bacterial membranes will be interfaced with specially designed electrodes, enabling electrical recordings of ETC activity to be obtained. This will be combined with genetic modification and computational modelling to enable quantitative analysis of electron transfer reactions. This cutting-edge project will enable the mapping of electron transport pathways akin to metabolic pathways, unlocking new discoveries in fundamental bioscience and sustainable biotechnologies for pharmaceutical, chemical and energy production.
This highly interdisciplinary project will include wet lab (~75%) and dry lab (~25%) components. Supervision and research will be joint between the School of Life Sciences and the Department of Chemistry. The student will learn diverse methodologies from microbiology, synthetic biology, electrochemistry, materials science, and computational biology research.
