PhD Studentship: Oiling the wheels of the lipid economy: discovering mechanisms for lipid trading through membrane contact sites in plants and animals. 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

"Eukaryotes produce an incredible variety of lipids that are made and destroyed in processes involving multiple organelles. Lipid intermediates must be transferred ‘on demand’ to prevent over-accumulation in any one compartment. This is an amazing feat as organelles are often in motion with speeds of over 10 microns per second, yet they still manage to perform lipid trading. There is now a growing recognition that brief membrane-to-membrane interactions, and the proteins that tether these events, are responsible for the flow of lipid species between organelles. In mammals and fungi the mechanisms for driving and managing these processes are better understood than in plants, where membranes interact but do so through a largely mysterious set of mechanisms. Understanding these unknowns in plants and mammals could provide opportunity to engineer new traits and disease resilience into crops and understand human diseases where lipid flow is disrupted.

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