PhD Studentship: Minding the gap: Fusarium graminearum navigation through restricted cell-space. 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.

Programme Overview:

You will be recruited to a broad, interdisciplinary project, supported by a multidisciplinary supervisory team, with many cross-institutional projects available. There are also opportunities to:

• apply your research in an industrial setting (DTP CASE studentships).
• undertake research jointly with our core and associate partners (Standard DTP studentships with an associate partner).
• work with other national/international researchers.
• undertake fieldwork.

Our structured training programme will ensure you are well equipped as a bioscience researcher, supporting careers into academia, industry and beyond.

Project Description

Multiple factors, including climatic, environmental, legislative and societal changes, have led to the evolution of problematic plant pathogens that are collectively responsible for annual losses of ~15% of total crop yield globally and are a serious threat to global food security. Major threats include Fusarium head blight (FHB)/scab disease of wheat caused by cereal-infecting Fusaria fungi including F. graminearum (Fg) (www.scabusa.org) (Fig.1(a)) and Zymoseptoria tritici (Zt) infection of foliar tissues (Figueroa et al.,2018). Understanding how these two filamentous ascomycete fungal pathogens colonise host tissue is essential for identifying effective control mechanisms.

The main scientific aim of this PhD project is to investigate both the cellular and molecular signalling mechanisms required for the traversing of Fg hyphae through the plasmodesmata in plant cell walls (Fig. 1(b&c)), a crucial phase in the infection process (Brown et al.,2010; Brown et al.,2017; Armer et al.,2024). To achieve this the student will learn how to use a range of existing tools (fungal reporter and singe gene deletion strains), established techniques (dual wheat-Fg RNA-seq analyses, light/confocal microscopy) and emerging technologies (microfluidics chips; Yanagisawa et al.,2021).The student will also be trained to quantify and mathematically model the in vitro growth of Fg strains on a microfluidics chip and in vivo data from Fg-wheat image datasets acquired from detailed microscopy studies.

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