Supervisors
Puja Kumari – Scottish Association for Marine Science
Tim Regan Roslin – Tim.Regan@roslin.ed.ac.uk
Michele Stanley – Scottish Association for Marine Science
Summary
Building climate-resilient seaweed by combining physiology, fieldwork and bioinformatics. Tackling key challenges in marine restoration and sustainable aquaculture while gaining diverse lab and field skills.
Project background
Kelps are cold-affiliated species sensitive to warming. There is a decline in their global distribution under ocean warming and salinity changes. The impact of climate change reduces their growth and photosynthetic efficiency, thereby reducing their resilience and net zero carbon footprint. Thus, it is important to build resilience in kelp cultivars, particularly at the hatchery stage to future-proof commercially important kelp strains that can be applied for ecosystem restoration projects.
Priming is a commonly used tool in agriculture to build environmental stress resilience where the exposure of early life stages to a medium stress event improves performance and tolerance to recurrent stress events. The primed traits persist across ontogeny and successive generations maintaining genetic diversity and circumventing gene modifications. While recent studies showed that thermal priming can influence kelp gametogenesis, reproductive success and performance of recruited offsprings. Priming strategies in seaweeds are in the nascent stage and highly species-specific. There’s no information on their inheritance in successive generations.
The studentship aims to develop priming strategies in kelps to enhance stress resilience, understand the physiological, molecular and epigenetic adaptation mechanisms and test the developed stress resilience in field trials for ecosystem services. The project has three main objectives.
Objective 1: Develop priming strategies for kelp (Saccharina latissima) gametophytes using sub-lethal extreme temperatures and low salinities to enhance growth, reproductive success and acclimatory responses.
Objective 2: Crossbreed selected primed resilient strains; assess the growth performance of recruited F1-F2 generation sporophytes in laboratory and field trials.
Objective 3: Assess molecular genetics and metabolic regulation of priming-based stress resilience in kelps.
Requirements
The suitable candidate should have a degree in either of the related subjects including, marine biology, aquaculture, algal biotechnology, marine science, botany, biochemistry, biotechnology, plant sciences and molecular biology. The hands-on experience with culturing algae, molecular biology techniques and basic statistics are desirable.
Application deadline(6 January 2025 at 12:00 noon, GMT)
