Dr A Brown
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
There has been increasing interest in phenotypic drug screening in recent years as a useful complement to the target-based screening that dominates pharmaceutical research. However, one of the perennial difficulties with phenotypic screening is target identification because active compounds could be affecting the observed phenotype through a large number of possible pathways. Observing the effects of a compound on the behaviour of C. elegans, a genetic model system, can give important clues about a compound’s conserved mode of action, but expert observation can miss quantitative symptoms and does not scale. In this project, the successful student will use high-resolution tracking technology to 1) quantify responses to a library of drugs with both known and unknown mode of action, 2) use machine learning to identify robust phenotypic signatures for compound classes and 3) predict and verify the mode of action for leads that are currently uncharacterised.
Students in the lab have the opportunity to use cutting edge imaging and analysis methods in an exciting, supportive environment. As this is a BBSRC CASE studentship, the successful applicant will also work closely with industrial scientists at Syngenta to see how their work can be put into practice in helping to solve a global challenge: dealing with parasitic nematodes.
Group website:
http://behave.csc.mrc.ac.uk/
Funding Notes
This studentship is funded by the BBSRC and covers full EU/UK tuition fees for the duration of the studentship as well as a generous tax-free stipend amounting to £24,000pa, paid in monthly installments.
References
R.F. Schwarz, R. Branicky, L.J. Grundy, W.R. Schafer, A.E.X. Brown (2015) Changes in Postural Syntax Characterize Sensory Modulation and Natural Variation of C. elegans Locomotion. PLOS Computational Biology 11: e1004322
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004322
E.I. Yemini, T. Jucikas, L. Grundy, A.E.X. Brown*, W.R. Schafer* (2013) A database of Caenorhabditis elegans behavioral phenotypes. Nature Methods 10:877-879 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2560
A.E.X. Brown, E.I. Yemini, T. Jucikas, L. Grundy, W.R. Schafer (2013) A dictionary of behavioral motifs reveals clusters of genes affecting Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 110:791-796
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211447110