PhD Studentship: Will climate change worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance? MRC GW4 BioMed DTP PhD studentship 2025/26 Entry, Department of Ecology and Conservation

About the GW4 BioMed2 Doctoral Training Partnership The partnership brings together the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff (lead) and Exeter to develop the next generation of biomedical researchers. Students will have access to the combined research strengths, training expertise and resources of the four research-intensive universities, with opportunities to participate in interdisciplinary and 'team science'. The DTP already has over 90 studentships over 6 cohorts in its first phase, along with 58 students over 3 cohorts in its second phase.

Project Summary:

Recent studies have shown that levels of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) increase at higher environmental temperatures, but we have limited understanding of the mechanisms causing this pattern. To improve our ability to control AMR, we need to expand our knowledge of the mechanisms through which temperature alters the selection and spread of AMR. This project will combine lab-based experiments, theory, and genome sequencing to achieve this.

Project Description:

The evolution and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are major threats to global health. Recent correlational studies have shown that levels of AMR increase at higher temperatures in environmental and pathogenic bacteria. However, an almost complete lack of empirical evidence to explain the mechanisms of these broad scale-patterns limits our ability to quantify, understand, and ultimately control potential synergistic impacts of climate change and AMR.

One of the major ways AMR spreads is through horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which allows bacteria to acquire DNA from individuals other than their immediate ancestors and is driven by mobile genetic elements, such as plasmids. This project’s key research question is whether the spread of plasmids increases at higher temperatures. If this is the case, then climate change may increase environmental reservoirs of AMR that can then spread into clinically relevant bacteria.

Below we suggest four different components of this project, but we will encourage any PhD student to lead the design of their own project to align closest to their interests. The project can take advantage of available libraries of >3000 well-characterised isolates of Klebsiella spp. isolates collected from the environment and from humans. These isolates cover 15 species, including the human pathogen K. pneumoniae, have variation in resistance profiles, and have high quality genomes from previous work. This gives us an unprecedented study system to understand how temperature alters plasmid transfer and persistence of AMR across a diverse set of closely-related isolates, including many opportunistic pathogens.

Advert information