New computational metabolomics to optimise food security for the world’s ruminants

The project:
Climate change and a growing population will stress the availability of food worldwide. Ruminant products, dairy and red meat are key constituents of most human diets, which depend on the health and welfare of the animals, which in turn depend on the quality of animal feed. Silage (fermented fodder) is the major component of most ruminant production systems whilst housed. In this fully funded studentship, we will for the first time employ global metabolomics profiling with high-resolution gas-chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and liquid infusion/uHPLC Orbitrap-MS to gain a deep understanding of how the fermentation processes are determined by the microorganisms contained within, and discover compounds to serve as robust indicators of silage quality (e.g. volatile fatty acids, mycotoxins, evidence of yeasts/moulds).

From this we will develop a diagnostic testing platform for silage quality based on analysing volatile organic compounds collected from the air around silage heaps, linking directly with feed value, risk of disease and the production potential of the ruminants. Absolutely critical to achieving these goals will be to build on state-of-the-art computational techniques developed by ourselves (http://www.biospi.org) and collaborators. To confidently identify salient biochemical compounds from the mass spectrometry data, the student will extend our seaMass group-sparse regression approach to consider groups of related compounds. To robustly correlate these compounds to corresponding signals in the VOCs data, we will develop new methodology similar to latent dirichlet allocation. Such novel techniques will be generically applicable to metabolomics far beyond the current project.

The studentship is funded by the School of Veterinary Science, University of Bristol, but will be based within Prof Dowsey’s group in Population Health Data Science near the main Bristol campus. The student will benefit from a rich collaboration with Rothamsted Research at North Wyke, Devon who will provide expertise on silage and livestock science (Prof Michael Lee and Prof David Davies), and the Organic Geochemistry Unit mass spectrometry facility directed by Prof Richard Evershed, where the sample analysis will be optimised. The studentship can start on a date between September 2017 and April 2018.

How to apply:
Please make an online application for this project at http://www.bris.ac.uk/pg-howtoapply. Please select ’Faculty of Health Sciences’ and then ‘Veterinary Sciences_(PhD)’ on the Programme Choice page and enter details of the studentship when prompted in the Funding and Research Details sections of the form

Candidate requirements: This studentship would suit an applicant with a strong first degree or masters which has elements of both chemistry and a mathematical discipline (e.g. mathematics, statistics, computing, chemometrics). Competent programming skills are essential.

Contacts: Prof Andrew Dowsey ([Email Address Removed])