About the Project
Second Supervisor: Dr Jan-Ulrich Kreft, University of Birmingham, School of Biosciences
Staphylococcus aureus colonises humans and animals and is a major cause of disease worldwide. During colonisation and infection, it encounters microbial communities that shape its physiology, competitiveness and survival. While these interactions are known to affect bacterial behaviour, little is known about whether they leave lasting effects once the interaction has ended. Recent work suggests that S. aureus can retain a "memory" of past signals that influences how it responds to future challenges. Whether interactions with other bacterial species produce similarly lasting effects remains unknown. Can bacteria be shaped not only by their current environment, but also by their past interactions? This PhD project will address this question by investigating whether S. aureus can retain a form of "memory" of past microbial encounters and whether its interaction history influences its future behaviour. The project will examine whether a bacterium's interaction history influences its ability to adapt to environments, survive stress, persist during antimicrobial exposure, form biofilms, and colonise hosts.You will compare strains from humans and livestock to determine whether these responses are shared across host environments, providing new insights into bacterial adaptation and One Health challenges.
The multidisciplinary supervisory team spans microbial physiology and signalling, host adaptation and One Health microbiology, and systems biology. You will have the opportunity to work with a high-throughput mini-bioreactor system for long-term adaptation experiments, combined with bacterial genetics, reporter assays, transcriptomics and metabolomics. Together, these approaches will be used to answer the question: how do past microbial interactions shape a bacterium's future?
Techniques that will be undertaken during the project
Generating and manipulating interactions
- High-throughput mini-bioreactor bacterial mono- and co-cultivation
- Bacterial genetics and mutant construction
Phenotypic readouts
- Gene reporter assays
- Biofilm formation and persistence assays
- Antimicrobial susceptibility testing
- Fluorescence microscopy
Molecular characterisation
- RNA sequencing and transcriptomic analysis
- Targeted metabolomics
- Whole-genome sequencing
Integration and analysis
- Systems biology and network analysis
- Bioinformatics and statistical analysis
- Computational modelling of microbial interactions
Enquiries
Project Enquiries to ks665@leicester.ac.uk
Programme enquiries to mibtp-admin@leicester.ac.uk
To apply please refer to
https://le.ac.uk/study/research-degrees/funded-opportunities/bbsrc-mibtp
Funding Notes
All MIBTP students will be provided with a 4 year studentship. This includes: Tuition fees at the UK fee rate*, a tax free stipend which for 2026/7 is £21,805 per year (2027/8 stipend to be confirmed), a travel allowance over years 1-3, a travel/conference budget, a generous consumables budget, use of a laptop for the duration of the programme. The University of Leicester will provide full overseas fee waivers for the duration of their study to all international students accepted at Leicester. The funder, UKRI, allows us to appoint up to 30% overseas students.
References
Podkowik M, et al. Elife. 2024. doi:10.7554/eLife.89098; Jenul C, et al. Cell Rep. 2023. doi:10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112540; Widder S, et al. ISME J. 2016.doi:10.1038/ismej.2016.45