PhD Opportunities (2), Department of Microbiology

Environmental Research Institute

The Environmental Research Institute (ERI), University College Cork, is a newly established facility which hosts research groups from a range of scientific disciplines, focussed on investigating environmental issues of regional, national and international significance.Funding is available through the Environmental Protection Agency, STRIVE doctoral programme for 2 PhD projects in the area of environmental microbiology. The successful candidates will join the U.C.C. Microbiology Department postgraduate program, and will carry out their projects within the ERI’s Environmental Microbial Genomics research group.

PhD 1.

Title: Investigation of biodegradable plastic production by an activated sludge microbial consortium treating dairy industry wastewater.
Duration: 3-4 years
Stipend: €14, 000 p.a. (plus fees)

Dairy industry wastewater can represent a hazardous waste product of dairy processing where high concentrations of organic and inorganic nutrients can lead to devastating water body pollution events.Our group is currently involved in novel applications of activated sludge systems (i.e. microbial consortiums), to facilitate the removal of such nutrients from various online dairy wastewater samples. The technology being investigated in this project involves a novel conversion of high organic wastewater content to polyhydroxyalkanoate, a biodegradable plastic, using the excess sludge from traditional biological nutrient removal as a biocatalyst.PHAs are intracellular bacterial polymers with similar elastomeric and thermal properties to current petrochemical plastics, but are completely biodegradable when released into the environment.The successful candidate will be expected to establish, operate and maintain sequencing batch reactors for sludge growth, waste water treatment and optimisation of PHA accumulation. In addition to physiological studies the project also entails significant molecular biology based investigations of the microbial consortium to determine microbial ecology and clone/sequence key genes of the PHA accumulation process.

PhD 2

Title: Elucidation of global regulatory signals controlling the pathway for degradation of styrene, a toxic pollutant, by the bioreactor isolate Pseudomonas putida CA-3.

Duration: 3-4 years
Stipend:€14, 000 (plus fees)

The project seeks to investigate a critical, yet poorly understood, aspect of the microbial biodegradation of aromatic pollutants, i.e. negative regulation in the presence of mixed carbon substrates, referred to as catabolite repression.The research outputs of this project will be the identification of regulatory targets whose modification by recombinant DNA technology may provide whole cell biocatalysts for process design aimed at reducing toxic pollutant outputs from petrochemical industry activities.This study focuses on the degradation of a single pollutant compound, styrene, by a well published environmental isolate Pseudomonas putida CA-3.However, due to recurrent similarities in published catabolite repression events of aromatic compound degradation by Pseudomonas species, the outputs of this study may be of relevance to numerous biodegradation applications among isolates from this genus.Molecular biology applications will form the primary research focus of the project and will include random/site directed mutagenesis, construction of homo-/heterologous expression systems, subtractive hybridisation and gene array technologies.

Application:
Candidates should have an honours degree (2H1) in Microbiology or a related discipline.To apply, please submit a CV, (not more than 3 pages) and a covering letter indicating your research goals/interests..

Closing date for applications: Monday, August 20^th, 2007.

For further information contact Dr. Niall O’ Leary, Microbiology Dept., U.C.C., Cork. Ph: 021 490 1390 or 4901972, email: N.Oleary@ucc.ie