PhD student position: Are bee viruses driving heritable symbiont success?

Recently, it has been demonstrated that inherited symbionts may protect their hosts from certain pathogens. Such protective phenotypes are potentially beneficial in terms of host fitness, and thus could aid symbiont establishment. This prediction is supported through ecological modeling, but has rarely been tested in natural settings.

Solitary bees and Wolbachia bacteria will be used as model host/symbiont system. The candidate will investigate natural populations of bees and measure symbiont and viral titres in different species collected in and around Oxfordshire. These data will be used to determine if symbiont infection status predicts viral loads. Further, the candidate will characterize symbiont genomes through Nanopore and Illumina sequencing and use pool-Seq to determine which genomic features of the symbionts correlate negatively with viral presence. Further, novel viruses potentially interacting with symbionts will be described through viral metagenomics of solitary bee samples.