The Nottingham DLA Partnership will provide cohort-based training in frontier science across priority areas focussed upon three overarching themes: Sustainable Agriculture and Food (SAF), Bioscience for Human Health (BHH) and Biotechnology for Sustainable Growth (BSG).
We offer a broad programme of research opportunities. Students will be recruited to specific cluster priority areas within these three overarching BBSRC priority themes. Each cluster will focus on a key challenge or emerging research priority within its theme. All clusters will include CASE projects and will be open for additional stakeholders and non-HEI partners to develop projects.
Sustainable Agriculture and Food - Heat Resilient Agriculture
Currently, over one billion people suffer from chronic malnourishment, while nearly 200 million children are severely underweight. Future environmental pressures will require farming to make further advances in resource efficiency. Beyond carbon footprint, ‘energy,’ ‘nitrogen,’ ‘phosphorus,’ and ‘water’ footprints may become the new farming and food currencies. Improved crop and soil management play a crucial role in developing heat-resilient agriculture, ensuring productivity under rising temperatures. Reducing water and resource use, enhancing food and fuel output and quality, delivering ecosystem services, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions are among the urgent challenges that must be addressed.
Sustainable farming will depend on multi-disciplinary approaches underpinned by sound science and the skills to translate novel solutions into practice. Research projects in Heat Resilient Agriculture will focus on studies ranging from the microbial, whole plant/animal, to field/farm and national scales to address these issues, incorporating techniques from plant, soil, and animal sciences to address these challenges.
Applicants with an interest in plant and/or soil science are particularly encouraged.
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Bioscience for Human Health - Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering & Drug Delivery
Within the biomaterials for tissue engineering and drug delivery cluster areas include:
- developing biomaterials that can instruct biology to support the generation of in vitro models of human tissues that can be used to investigate normal tissue homeostasis and/or to support tissue regeneration.
- biomaterials that can support the delivery of complex therapeutics or that can be used to address the rise in antimicrobial resistance.
These materials will advance our understanding of biological process or allow us to control and influence a biological response to support health. Example of a project that fits within this these is the CASE project - novel self-oxygenating and cell-instructive materials for chronic wound healing.
We will be generating and selecting propjects in the Spring and these will be made available in early summer. There will be a selection of projects available within the theme of Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery.
Biotechnology for Sustainable Growth - Technologies for Sustainable Protein Synthesis
This cluster focuses on different platforms for production of recombinant proteins of pharmaceutical interest. Different protein expression systems will be deployed to generate diverse proteins. Our established platforms include Escherichia coli, yeast, plant and mammalian cells and algae.
Embedded in all these projects is sustainability whereby ease of manufacture, low-cost production, feasibility of scale-up are all important factors for commercialisation. Students and supervisors in this cluster will meet throughout the programme for cross-fertilisation of skills and ideas and to work closely as a community. Some of the skills that will be learned in this cluster are in silico modelling, gene cloning, optimising conditions for protein production, protein purification and characterisation, and testing protein functionality in assays.
Applied projects are in the areas of:
- Engineering recombinant antibodies as therapies or for diagnostic purposes,
- Engineering Escherichia coli to make recombinant outer membrane vesicle (OMV) vaccines,
- Exploiting an Escherichia coli secretion system to release recombinant antigens out of the cell in soluble form for facile purification,
- Engineering algae to make novel oral vaccines.
Fundamental projects are in the areas of:
- Addressing the challenges of protein yield and solubility using novel tags,
- Understanding how RNA modifications influence how mRNA engages with RNA, helicases that enable mRNAs to engage with ribosomes to promote translation. This knowledge can be used to enhance expression of therapeutic proteins and vaccines,
- Engineering chimeric proteins to crosslink and provide an increased binding affinity for macrophage endocytic receptors to clear toxic or pathological proteins more effectively.
How to apply