From Strandings to Sequence: Portable Metagenomic Pathogen Surveillance, Pathology and Disease Ecology in Scotland's Marine Mammals
Supervisors:
Dr Andrew Brownlow, School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences (SMASS), University of Glasgow
Dr Sarah Helyar, School of Biological Sciences, Queen's University Belfast
Dr Jo Moore, Moredun Research Institute
Summary
Why do some marine mammals die of infection while others carry the same pathogens and thrive? Long-lived, highly mobile top predators, marine mammals are recognised sentinels of ocean health — yet their disease ecology is hard to study: surveillance depends almost entirely on stranded animals, yet we have seldom been able to measure an individual's whole burden of disease, ruling pathogens out as confidently as ruling them in.
Three developments now make this answerable for the first time: portable long-read sequencing that works on degraded tissue without cold chains or reference laboratories; a thirty-year Scottish strandings archive of matched frozen tissue and histopathology, uniquely suited to validating new diagnostics against confirmed pathology; and AI-driven analytical techniques capable of mining pathogen, pathology and environmental data across thousands of cases.
This PhD, based at the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS, University of Glasgow) with partners at Queen's University Belfast and the Moredun Research Institute, will answer that question at scale. The student will develop high-throughput, cold-chain-free sequencing diagnostics, benchmark them against thirty years of matched tissue and histopathology from Scottish strandings, and use them to test whether co-infection and contaminant exposure shape survival spanning agents including cetacean morbillivirus, Brucella and avian influenza. The validated pipeline will then be translated, via the IWC Strandings Expert Panel, into a 'laboratory-in-a-suitcase' for stranding networks worldwide.
As a student on this programme you will graduate with training spanning field pathology, long-read sequencing and bioinformatics, containment diagnostics, epidemiology, and science communication and policy engagement.