Durham Doctoral Teaching Fellowship: Carbon dioxide detection by nucleic acids

As the chemical industry prepares to decarbonise to deliver Net Zero emissions targets, there is a need to transform the sector’s sources of energy, raw materials, and structure. The production of chemicals via fossil fuels is central to the modern economy and consumes 10% of global energy demand while releasing 7% of global CO₂ emissions. Solar energy is the most abundant source of energy on earth, and innovations that harness solar energy, while also transforming CO₂ emissions into valuable chemicals, have the potential to become the pillar of a low-carbon and sustainable industry.

This PhD project will understand how CO₂ is sensed to modulate the biology of key organisms in sustainable industry.

Carbon dioxide is the substrate for photosynthesis and is incorporated into sugars using chemical energy and reducing power produced via light energy. There is, unsurprisingly, considerable research toward understanding photosynthesis and carbon dioxide fixation. Improvements in the efficiency of these processes have application in photosynthetic micro-organisms as bio-factories for high-value chemical production.

Cyanobacteria are useful bio-factories for the production of high-value chemicals. Metabolic engineering of cyanobacteria is attractive because of their inherent high biomass yield per unit surface area and the potential for CO₂ mitigation during production. A key challenge for the use of cyanobacteria as bio-factories is to understand how they sense CO₂ to adapt their physiology.

This PhD will address this challenge. The supervisory team has specific expertise in supervising multidisciplinary projects at the biosciences-chemistry interface and in identifying CO₂ targets.

This expertise will be developed in three ways through three objectives.

1. Use a combination of physical chemistry, organic synthesis, chromatography, mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance to demonstrate that CO₂ can bind nucleosides and small nucleic acids.
2. Use competition binding assays to demonstrate that host cyanobacterial nucleic acids possess CO₂ binding sites. Develop a high throughput screen based on the Oxford Nanopore to identify CO₂ binding sites in cyanobacterial RNA.
3. Understanding the impact of the identified RNA on cyanobacterial CO₂ handling.

The student will experience training in Biosciences and Chemistry

Biosciences-Molecular biology, protein expression and purification, nucleic acid purification, microbial culture and handling. Chemistry-Chemical handling, potentiometry, NMR, nucleic acid chemistry, organic synthesis. Interdisciplinary-Mass spectrometry, chromatography, data handling and analysis, computational skills.

Please contact Professor Martin Cann ([email protected]) or Professor David Hodgson ([email protected]) for informal enquiries.

The studentship is a Durham Doctoral Teaching Fellowship (DDTF). Successful candidates will pursue their research programme and also support the degree programme in Biochemistry/Biotechnology in the Department of Biosciences. The student will develop skills in tutorial delivery, academic support, and assist in the delivery of practicals. This opportunity will give the postgraduate student a diverse teaching and research portfolio.

The ideal candidate will have an undergraduate background in biosciences, independently or in combination with another discipline, preferably with biochemistry and/or biological chemistry knowledge.