Building resilient Kelp cultivars via priming with multiple environmental stressors

Lead Supervisor/Director of Studies: Dr Puja Kumari 

Supervisory Team: Dr Tim Regan, Prof. Michele Stanley

Application deadline: 6 January 2025 at 12:00 noon, GMT

Competition Funded PhD Project Students Worldwide (Please refer to the detailed guidelines on the E4-DTP website for eligibility requirements).

Location: Although the student will mainly be based at SAMS, for 4 months they will work at the Kilchoan site during field-trials, and for 6 months, they will undertake bioinformatic training at the Roslin Institute (UoE).

The project is a part of E5 Doctoral Training Partnership with the University of Edinburgh. For more details please refer to the following link https://e4-dtp.ed.ac.uk/e5-dtp/supervisor-led-projects/project?item=1694 , and a for a full list of projects offered under this programme, please visit https://e4-dtp.ed.ac.uk/e5-dtp/projects.

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.  

Research questions

1. How does priming work in kelps across different ontogenic life stages and how long does it persist?

2. How does priming affect kelp physiology and biochemical metabolic adaptations?

3. How do epigenetics and transcriptional regulation contribute to the priming process?

4. Can priming enhance kelp resilience and improve their growth performance against multiple stresses, particularly in field trials?

Methodology

Year 1

Receive training for maintaining cultures of kelp gametophyte and sporophyte cultures from SAMS in-house seaweed nursery.

Preconditioning experiments for kelp gametophytes and sporophytes under different salinities and temperatures for different time durations alongside controls maintained under ambient culture conditions.

Expose control and primed gametophytes and sporophyte cultures to extreme temperature and salinities (triggering stress) to test the validity of priming strategies.

Assess growth, reproductive success and acclimatory physiological and biochemical responses in control, primed and multiple stress-triggered gametophytes and sporophytes and collect samples for metabolome and genetic (transcriptomic, epigenetic) analyses.

Crossbreed selected primed resilient gametophyte strains to obtain sporophytes (F1 generation).

Year 2

Culturing of F1-sporophytes obtained from priming experiments at laboratory and field trials (in collaboration with Kilchoan estate and/ or at SAMS farm site).

4 months placement at Kilchoan estate for field trials of F1-generation.

Assess resilience of F1 – sporophytes by monitoring growth performance, physiological and biochemical responses.

Conduct metabolomic analyses (metabolite extraction and obtaining profiles) of primed gametophytes and sporophytes samples.

3 months placement at the Roslin Institute to conduct molecular (epigenetic) analysis and requisite bioinformatic training.

Obtain F2-generation gametophytes and sporophytes from primed F1-sporophytes.

Manuscript writing based on priming strategies in kelps and their physiological and phenotypic characterisation based on laboratory and field trials.

Year 3

Assess thermal and salinity tolerance of F2-gametophytes and sporophytes in laboratory.

3 months placement at the Roslin Institute to conduct gene expression analysis of selected stress marker genes to compare primed vs non-primed individuals from F1 and F2 generation to measure responses to a given stimuli of elevated temperature and reduced salinity.

Complete bioinformatic analysis for metabolic and molecular epigenetics data.

Manuscript writing based on metabolomics and genomics data.

Thesis writing.

Training

A comprehensive training programme will be provided comprising both specialist scientific training and generic transferable and professional skills.

The student will gain a wide variety of experimental, analytical and scientific skills. They will be trained in seaweed biology at both laboratory-scale and farm-scale, including nursery technologies (spore development, different life cycle ontologies maintenance), breeding, conducting multiple stress experiments, trait characterisation, physiological, metabolomic, molecular tools (nucleic acid extraction, primer designing, gene expression, epigenetics), microscopy and seaweed cultivation in field-trials. The student will spend 4-months at Kilchoan site during field-trials and 6-months at the Roslin Institute (UoE) for bioinformatic trainings. This comprehensive training will be transferable to both academia and industry spanning applications in marine biology, algal aquaculture, and genetic and molecular biology.

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.

We recognise that not every talented researcher will have had the same opportunities to advance their careers. We therefore will account for any particular circumstances that applicants disclose (e.g. parental leave, caring duties, part-time jobs to support studies, disabilities etc.) to ensure an inclusive and fair recruitment process.