PhD projects to be confirmed on completion of the training year.

"Multi-drug resistant (MDR) E. coli is a global problem causing a high burden of invasive disease in both humans and animals, their emergence is driven by a small number of pandemic clones. This project aims to underpin the difference that facilitate the expansion of MDR clones versus non-MDR clones. Understanding, the evolutionary processes and mechanisms by which bacterial pathogens emerge is a key challenge for evolutionary biology and microbiology.
This project will look to examine unique patterns of selection in MDR E. coli by examining the core genome of E. coli lineages. The aim is to develop a method to identify genes with hyper-conserved and hyper-variant sequences and evaluate how this may have influenced selection and success of certain clones. Hyper-conserved sequences would indicate strong purifying selection whereas hyper-variation would indicate influence from selective pressure. This analysis will allow us to identify genes that come under unique selective pressures in MDR clones of E. coli compared to their drug susceptible neighbours."