PhD student in Ecology and Evolution

Project description
The Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences invites applications for a four-year PhD position part of the project “Interactions and dependencies on the free-living microbial world”. Moreover, this project will be conducted in close collaboration with SciLife Lab (www.scilifelab.se), where the working atmosphere is international with English as the working language.

The main goal of the project is to understand and characterize microbial associations in aquatic environments. To do this, a combination of cultivation-based or cultivation-independent techniques (such as shotgun sequencing) will be used. Free-living bacteria are the most abundant in aquatic systems and they feature a reduced genome size which leaves them depending on interactions with other organisms. These interactions develop over time as microorganisms lose genes because they can utilize metabolites that are released by other organisms sharing the same external environment. Eventually, a form of symbiosis is established lead by a synergistic coevolution. As examples, interactions in microorganisms take the form of metabolic auxotrophies, dependencies, cross feeding and complementarities.

The PhD student will be able to develop and test research hypothesis about microbial ecology, genetic population structures, test models of species interactions and direct evolution of interactions and genome streamlining in microorganisms.