PhD Studentship: Will climate change worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance? 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

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is emerging as one of the greatest threats to human 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.

Mobile genetic elements, such as plasmids, play a key role in spreading AMR, by allowing bacteria to acquire DNA through horizontal gene transfer (HGT). This project’s key research question is whether the selection and spread of plasmids and AMR 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.

This interdisciplinary project will use a library of >3000 well-characterised isolates of Klebsiella spp. isolates collected from the environment and from humans by the Feil Lab. 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 represents an unprecedented study system to understand how temperature impacts the ecology and evolution of AMR across a diverse set of closely-related isolates.

This project will combine controlled experiments, sequencing, and mathematical modelling to:

1. determine how environmental and clinical Klebsiella spp. respond differentially to temperature;
2. understand how plasmid transfer rate changes with temperature;
3. quantify the cost of plasmid carriage and the impact of environmentally-relevant antibiotic concentrations on Klebsiella spp.;
4. establish the impacts of antibiotics and temperature on natural communities.

The project includes a large amount of microbiology lab work and mathematical models will be integrated in an iterative way to generate testable hypotheses and design future experiments.

This work will result in a step-change in our understanding of how climate warming will alter the selection and spread of AMR. By using ideas from climate change and trait-based ecology and using both clinical and environmental (such as soils and waterways) Klebsiella isolates, the project has potential to yield results of interest for sustainable agriculture and global health. The student will become part of a highly interdisciplinary team that has specialisms in experimental evolution (Padfield, Buckling), environmental AMR (Leonard, Feil), mathematical modelling (Kuijper, Feil), and bioinformatics (Padfield, Feil), and the mix of ECR and experienced PIs will give the student a unique training and research experience.

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