PhD Studentship: Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance by Understanding Bacterial Interactions. BBSRC SWBio DTP PhD Studentship 2023 Entry. PhD in Biosciences

The BBSRC -funded South West Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership (SWBio DTP ) involves a partnership of world-renown universities, research institutes and industry across the South West and Wales.

This partnership represents a distinctive group of bioscientists, with established international, national and regional networks, and widely recognised research excellence. 

We aim to provide students with outstanding interdisciplinary research training within the following themes, underpinned by transformative technologies: 

Advancing the frontiers of biosciences discovery

Biosciences for sustainable agriculture and food

Biosciences for an integrated understanding of health  

These are growth areas of the biosciences and for which there will be considerable future demand. 

The award:

This project is one of a number that are in competition for funding from the South West Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership (SWBio DTP). 

Project Description

We cannot see bacteria but there are trillions of them in us or on us. Many bacteria are beneficial for us, some however, can cause infectious diseases such as meningitis, pneumonia or sepsis. Indeed, bacterial infections are one of the leading causes of death worldwide with a yearly death toll of 5 million people that is twice as large as the yearly death toll caused by Covid-19 (Murray et al. Lancet 2022). 

Infectious diseases were once believed to originate from a single species of pathogenic bacteria. However, increasing evidence suggests that several infectious diseases are caused by the presence of multiple bacteria (Reece et al. Antibiotics 2021). Unfortunately, antimicrobial treatment is generally targeted at a single species and does not take into account the effect of the presence of the other bacterial species. These different bacterial species might affect each other, and the treatment given for one species, might affect the other species. However, we have very limited knowledge of these interactions between bacteria and their impact on antibiotic therapy. Therefore, there is an urgent need to understand how different bacterial pathogens interact with each other in order to improve patient outcome.

This project will determine the interactions between bacterial pathogens typically co-isolated from patients with airway or wound infections such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus. This is important because interactions between these two bacterial pathogens could impact patient outcome (Bernardy et al. mBio 2020). 

In this project you will use novel technologies, such as single-cell microfluidics (Lapinska et al. eLife 2022), to study the interactions between bacterial communities that are known to co-exist within airway or wound infections. You will then use omics approaches, such as next generation sequencing and proteomics (Goode et al. mBio 2021. Duggan et al. Infection and Immunity 2020), to understand how two bacterial species interact with each other. By using this new knowledge you will determine how the presence of multiple bacteria affect antibacterial treatments routinely used in the clinic. Next, you will establish alternative and more effective antibacterial treatments based on combinations of antibiotics and bacteriophages that are virus capable to kill bacteria (Alseth et al. Nature 2019; Attrill et al. PLoS Biology 2021; Dimitriu et al. Cell Host Microbe 2022) with the aim of treating infections caused by two of the deadliest bacteria on Earth (Murray et al. Lancet 2022).