PhD Studentship: Integrating Transcriptomics and Phenomics for Accelerating Chemical Safety Assessment

Chemical pollution poses a severe threat to human and environmental health, with over 350,000 chemicals present in commercial products and the environment. However, comprehensive toxicity data for these chemicals are largely lacking, hindering their safety assessment. Traditional animal testing methods face limitations due to their low predictive value for humans, high costs, ethical concerns, and societal pressure. There is a growing global focus on developing innovative safety assessment methods that are more relevant to human health, provide mechanistic insights, and allow for the efficient screening of large numbers of substances and their mixtures without relying on animals.

'Omics' approaches—such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics—have revolutionized non-animal safety assessments by measuring global biomolecular changes in cells exposed to chemicals. However, traditional omics approaches face significant challenges in connecting biomolecular alterations with toxicological outcomes of regulatory concern. Conversely, phenotype-based whole organism screening methods (referred to as phenomics can assess individual-level effects by direct observations of behavioural toxicity. However, phenomics approaches fall short in providing specific insights into the mechanisms through which chemicals exert their toxic effects, which can hinder the development of precise assessment of chemical safety.

This project aims to develop a novel multi-omics methodology that integrates transcriptomics and phenomics approaches to overcome the current limitations of omics methods in regulatory toxicology. This will be achieved by deploying high-throughput transcriptomics and phenomics approaches to identifying global gene expressions and behavioural changes induced by chemicals in Daphnia magna. The transcriptomics and phenomics data will be integrated into an adverse outcome pathway (AOP) network framework to develop a computational modelling for chemical toxicity prediction. The team combines the knowledge base expertise in developing novel tools for multi omics-based assessment of environmental chemicals and computational modelling for accurate prediction of chemical toxicity with the integration of both high-throughput molecular and phenotype-level data, accelerating current regulatory acceptance of omics approaches in chemical safety assessment.

For further information on this project and details of how to apply to it please click on the above 'Apply' button.

Further information on how to apply for a CENTA studentship can be found on the CENTA website: https://centa.ac.uk/

This project is offered through the CENTA3 DTP, with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Funding covers an annual stipend, tuition fees (at home-fee level) and Research Training Support Grant.

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