• 2020 close

AHRC : Jessica Robins : AH/R504671/1 "Breaking Eggs" is an exciting project sharing knowledge between the UK and Canada. The project invites residents of Guelph, Wellington to take part in a series of hands-on workshops responding to the beginning of Our Food Future project, a city wide, 5-year project that aims to use technological innovation to make the region a sustainable food hub for Canada. Our Food Future is a multi-million-dollar project that will use technology to radically change the way food is grown, distributed and consumed. The project will make Guelph the world's first circular food city, using technology to make sure everyone has enough to eat and waste is eliminated, while restoring natural systems. The workshops will use creative methods to help local community members explore the wider project and examine avenues for their engagement. It will look at what opportunities' residents could take advantage of, and what challenges communities could face during this transition. Breaking Eggs will take place in the first year of the Our Food Future project so will give residents of different local communities a chance to be involved in shaping the project. The workshops will invite people from all parts of Guelph and Wellington County to take part in sharing ideas and creating a new future for the region. The lessons learned through the project will be brought back to the UK and the knowledge gathered will be shared so that other communities can look at ways they can engage in more sustainable food systems for their region.

The development of new sustainable processes is a crucial goal of modern chemistry. Most large-scale reactions currently employed by the chemical industry consume non-renewable resources and require catalysts based on metals which are often scarce, expensive and toxic. This is especially true for plastics made from hydrocarbon-based polymers such as polyethylene. These are produced from petrochemicals and so their production requires the continued extraction of the earth's limited supply of fossil fuels and drives climate change. These plastics are also non-biodegradable, resulting in well documented environmental issues caused by their accumulation in the ocean and other natural habitats. As such the production of biodegradable polymers from renewable resources is of paramount importance. One promising solution is the use of molecules such as lactones and lactide, which are known as cyclic esters and are produced by fermenting renewable biomass such as corn and sugar beets. These molecules are cyclic, but their ring-shaped structures can be activated by a catalyst containing a charged metal ion. This enables a reactive carbon-oxygen bond to be broken, opening up the ring to form a short linear chain, which can then be linked with others to form a long polymer chain by forming new carbon-oxygen bonds between them. The metal catalyst speeds up the reaction and is regenerated at the end of the cycle, potentially enabling it to be recycled. The development of new catalysts that enable the controlled synthesis of polymers at low temperatures is key. The use of metal-carbon based catalysts is a well-established method for activating small molecules such as lactones and lactide and enabling their transformation into useful products. With sustainability in mind, it is beneficial for any new catalysts to contain metals which are abundant, cheap and non-toxic. These sustainability criteria are satisfied by the so-called alkaline earth metals that occupy the second column of the periodic table (group 2), making them attractive candidates for use as sustainable catalysts. In particular, the heavy group 2 elements strontium and barium hold untapped potential as catalysts and are worthy of further investigation. Other potential candidates are the elements samarium, europium and ytterbium - like strontium and barium these heavy elements are large in size, while also being abundant and non-toxic relative to other heavy metals. This project falls within the EPSRC Physical Sciences research area and will take place in the O'Hare group. Its initial aims will be to develop novel catalysts containing strontium and barium, at a later stage complexes containing samarium, europium and ytterbium will also be investigated. Computational methods will be brought into the project via a collaboration with the McGrady group. The objective will be to develop structure-function relationships for these catalysts. The reactivity of these complexes with lactones and lactide will be investigated to determine which metal most effectively catalyses the production of biodegradable polymers.

Prophages are viruses (bacteriophages) that have integrated into bacterial genomes, but their contribution to the success of their hosts has been grossly under-estimated. We aim to provide a more detailed view of prophage influence on the bacterial host, which will greatly expand our understanding of a system where they are known to be important, but not how they are important. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogen of plants, animals and humans will be our model prophage/bacterial host system. We will specifically focus on the Liverpool Epidemic Strain (LES) and, a less pathogenic model strain, PAO1. The LES strain is known to carry multiple prophages that have been proven to enhance its competitiveness. The LES prophages do not encode any known toxins or virulence factors but have been associated with altered metabolic pathways and other biological traits of P. aeruginosa. Prophage sequences are found in almost all bacterial strains. However, very little is actually known about the genetic information that these prophages carry. In fact 75% or more of most prophage genes are annotated as hypothetical (often referred to as phage dark matter). These hypothetical sequences may be shared across many different phages but, unless they have been identified as virulence-related factors, the relevance of these sequences to the biology of the host is generally ignored. Recently, the importance of some of this dark matter has been elucidated and shown to regulate bacterial host genes or to promote bacterial survival. At this point in time when we are losing the battle in controlling the spread of multidrug resistant bacterial infections, there is an urgent need to better understand all of the genetic elements that are controlling bacterial biology. These data will help to produce better informed strategies for the control of bacterial infection and also aid the understanding of lytic bacteriophages that are currently being used in the development of phage therapy. Our objectives will uncover the hidden mechanisms by which prophage "puppet masters" affect the biology and fitness of P. aeruginosa: We have purified multiple inducible prophages from the LES strain of P. aeruginosa. We have constructed a precise set of tools and strains to investigate the direct effect of each prophage (separately and in combination) on a well-characterised model host strain, compared to a strain where the prophages are absent. We will use cutting edge techniques, combining knowledge of genome architecture, changes in gene expression and putative regulators to reveal the different ways that prophages impact their bacterial hosts. Cloning of identified regulators and mutant construction will enable association of prophage genes to functional pathways. We will monitor the impact of identified prophage-encoded elements under many varied environmental parameters that reflect the niches of P. aeruginosa. This combined approach will elucidate the interactions between three cohabiting LES prophages and their host to understand better their control of the bacterial behaviour. Applications and benefits: Not only will these studies inform a better understanding of P. aeruginosa biology, but the techniques can be applied to other phage-host systems. Bioinformatic tools have been much improved in recent years, for identifying prophages in bacterial genomes. But without functional studies such as ours, the relevance of the phage genes remains part of the dark matter. Identifying function of unknown genes (that are conserved across phage databases) will transform the field of phage biology and our fundamental understanding of microbiology.