PhD Studentship: PhD StudentshipPhD Opportunity Title Reconstructing ancestral animal cell types by a single cell analysis and comparative genomic approach BBSRC SWBio DTP PhD studentship 2025 Entry

About:

The BBSRC-funded SWBio DTP involves a partnership of world-renown universities, research institutes and industry, based mainly across the South West and Wales.

This partnership has established international, national and regional scientific networks, and widely recognised research excellence and facilities.

We aim to provide you with outstanding interdisciplinary bioscience research training, underpinned by transformative technologies.

Project Description

Cell types are the fundamental building blocks of multicellular organisms and are central to understanding the biosciences. While many cell types, such as neurons and muscle cells, are shared across animal lineages, others appear specific to certain groups, like vertebrate immune cells or cnidarian cnidocytes. This raises important questions: How did this vast diversity of cell types emerge? Are new cell types frequently created during evolution, or are they conserved across groups? Answering these questions is crucial for understanding the evolution of cell types and, consequently, multicellular organisms.

Recent advances in single-cell technologies have enabled the detailed investigation of cell types within species, yet comparing these cell types across species remains challenging. The evolution of cell types is deeply tied to the genomic history of each gene and its expression patterns. However, there is a lack of methods that integrate single-cell analyses with comparative genomics comparisons to reveal these evolutionary relationships.

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