Competitive funded PhD Position available in Department of Biology and Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford Title: Exploring fifty million years of antimicrobial 'crowd-sourcing' by bdelloid rotifers Supervisors: Prof Tim Barraclough, Dr Chris Wilson (Department of Biology), Dr Thomas Lanyon-Hogg (Pharmacology) Via successful competition for departmental scholarships or through a UKRI landscape award to cover stipend and home or international fees Organisms risk being overwhelmed by rapidly evolving natural enemies, unless they generate new resistance variants quickly enough. Typically, animals and plants use sex to create new resistance genotypes. We recently discovered a case that challenges this paradigm. Bdelloid rotifers encode thousands of horizontally acquired genes domesticated from bacteria, fungi and plants. Hundreds of these alien genes are upregulated in response to attack by fungal pathogens. The genes match several unprecedented functions in animals, including giant genes predicted to synthesise bioactive molecules such as antibiotics (Nowell et al. 2024 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49919-1). This project will investigate the extraordinary possibility that bdelloid rotifers are stealing biosynthetic gene clusters from microbes on an unimagined scale, repurposing them to synthesise antimicrobial secondary metabolites normally inaccessible to animals, and re-deploying these compounds against their own natural enemies. Aims will include to characterise the compounds, how they might have changed during domestication by bdelloids, and investigate mechanisms for generating variability in bdelloid populations. This unusual animal system could provide a new source of antimicrobials that function safely in animal cells, as well as insights into the genomic steps needed to repurpose prokaryotic machinery to defend animals. The project will explore a new approach for antimicrobial discovery by exploiting a non-model clade that has 'hoovered up' genes from the environment - an analogue of artificial heterologous genetic engineering running over millions of years. Tailored to the interests of the student, the project will comprise a blend of bioinformatic analyses of genome and transcriptome data, investigation of how putative compounds changed during the domestication process, lab work to characterise the chemicals being produced and their activity against microbes, exploring how bdelloids generate variability in their chemical defences, or optimising potential use of the system to develop new antimicrobials. Funding: Funding is available competitively either through DPhil in Biology graduate scholarships or the new BBSRC-NERC Interdisciplinary Life and Environmental Science Landscape Award (ILESLA). Eligibility: Home or international students. For full entry requirements and eligibility information, please see https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/dphil-biology How to apply: The deadline for applications for this project entry is midday 5th January 2024, selecting both DPhil in Biology and ILESLA as course options. You can find the admissions portal and further information about eligibility and the DPhil in Biology Programme at https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/dphil-biology Queries and advice on applying: Prof Tim Barraclough tim.barraclough@biology.ox.ac.uk Prof Tim Barraclough Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Tutorial Fellow, Magdalen College, https://www.biology.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-tim-barraclough The Evolutionary Biology of Species Timothy G. Barraclough Available from Oxford University Press: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198749752.do Timothy Barraclough (to subscribe/unsubscribe the EvolDir send mail to golding@mcmaster.ca)