Novel methodologies to assess the environmental health of freshwater systems. (5057)

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most threatened on Earth, increasingly exposed to complex mixtures of natural and anthropogenic chemicals that can cause both toxic and sublethal effects in species. These exposures, combined with abiotic changes such as temperature, pH, and oxygen levels, lead to multifaceted stress scenarios that may not result in immediate mortality but can disrupt physiology, development, and behaviour. This complexity poses major challenges for assessing chemical impacts and determining safe environmental thresholds for both novel and existing pollutants, especially with regard to individual and ecosystem-level health. Addressing this challenge demands innovative, high throughput methodologies for rapid, detailed assessment of chemical exposures. While such technologies exist for vertebrate models, driven by a bias toward their perceived importance, equivalent tools for freshwater invertebrates are largely lacking. This creates a significant knowledge gap and a major barrier to understanding and protecting aquatic biodiversity. This PhD directly addresses this issue by developing and applying advanced high throughput methods that enable comprehensive assessment of chemical impacts on freshwater invertebrates, moving beyond the limitations of existing approaches. The project aims to integrate toxicogenomics and high throughput phenotyping, via EmbryoPhenomics, to assess the effects of environmental chemicals and their mixtures on freshwater organisms. The student will develop a combined transcriptomic (next generation sequencing) and phenomic (high throughput imaging, computer vision, deep learning) approach to assess chemical exposure impacts on invertebrate phenotype and gene expression. They will assess the sensitivity and robustness of this approach using Daphnia pulex as a model organism and apply it to real world exposure scenarios within the Exe, Tamar, and Dart catchments (Living Labs).