PhD position in Fungus-Animal Interactions (1.0 FTE)

Infected animals often behave differently from healthy animals. These changes can involve precise manipulations caused by parasites to increase that parasite’s chances to spread. How exactly manipulative parasites can alter host behaviour is largely unknown. Uncovering the parasite compounds and host pathways involved could have both medical and agricultural applications through the discovery of novel drugs and holistic methods to battle insect pests. The behaviourally tractable “zombie ant system” has the potential to expose the mechanisms underlying parasitic behavioural manipulation and fundamentally transform perceptions of parasite-host interactions and their behavioural ecology effects. Our research group uses these fungus-infected “zombie ants” as a model to study disease progression, related behavioural phenotypes, and the mechanisms underlying those phenotypes. We love to push the boundaries when it comes to available techniques for this novel model system, so we often find ourselves adopting and creating new tools to answer our research questions.

The nature of the research that you will be involved in is naturally integrative. As such, your work will involve a variety of tasks spanning the fields of molecular microbiology, genetics, genomics, and behavioural ecology:

• Apply gene-editing and other molecular microbiology and genetics technology to study the function of candidate manipulation compounds.
• Produce and analyse genomics and transcriptomics datasets to reveal host pathways involved in altered behaviours.
• Conduct infection and compound exposure experiments with a variety of invertebrate host organisms ranging from established model systems to ant colonies collected from nature.
• Use quantitative behavioural tracking software and conducting statistical analyses to study disease-related behavioural phenotypes.
• Participate in yearly field expeditions to Florida (USA) to collect carpenter ant colonies.