About the Project

This project is being advertised as part of the Engineering Biology for Environmental Applications Doctoral Focal Award, led by Cranfield University. The project carries a UKRI TechExpert enhanced annual stipend of £31,805 available to students with Home fee status.

Supervisory Team: Dr. William King

Project Overview: Pesticides are vital chemicals that ensure food security and food availability. However, they are significant environmental pollutants. Designing new ways to reduce the environmental impact of these chemicals is a challenge. One potential method is leveraging microbial functions to degrade pesticides. Here, we will isolate pesticide degrading bacteria, engineer synthetic communities for soil application, and determine the genetic basis for pesticide degradation.

Project Description: Pesticides are vital for controlling agricultural pests (i.e. insects) and pathogens and for securing reliable agricultural production. While incredibly important for food security, and supporting agricultural intensification, pesticides can have several off-target effects and persist in the environment for significant lengths of time. For example, a survey of European soils identified over 80% of tested soils had one or more pesticide residues. One means of controlling pesticide contamination is by leveraging bacterial functions to degrade pesticides. However, simply applying pesticide-degrading bacteria to agricultural soils does not reliably work due to a suite of abiotic and biotic factors that impede bacterial colonisation and preferences for other carbon resources. Therefore, can we engineer a microbiome that can degrade pesticides but also persists in the environment? The critical question in this project is how can we ensure pesticides are effectively used but then efficiently broken down to prevent environmental pollution? In this project, you will: (i) capture the active pesticide degrading portion of the microbiome with cutting-edge BONCAT-FACS, (ii) engineer a synthetic microbiome with pesticide-degrading abilities, (iii) determine and optimise the deployment and persistence of engineered bacterial communities in soil and plant systems, and (iv) identify how plant-bacterial interactions, via exudates, can enhance pesticide degradation. Within this context, you will identify the genetic basis for both pesticide degradation and co-existence within an engineered microbiome, and you will leverage state-of-the-art microfluidics technologies to assess pesticide degradation, emergent properties, and for synthetic community construction. In this interdisciplinary project, you will have the opportunity to develop skills in microbiology, plant biology, bioinformatics, and chemistry, and you will engage with partners at Syngenta. The project is expected to identify the diversity of pesticide-degrading bacteria, the genes responsible for degrading these pollutants, and how to effectively deploy these bacteria into soil and plant systems. Please reach out to Dr. William King (W.L.King@soton.ac.uk) with your CV before applying to ask about the project.

Entry Requirements: A very good undergraduate degree (at least a UK 2:1 honours degree, or its international equivalent).