PhD Studentship: Astrocyte-Microglia Crosstalk in Alzheimer’s Disease- UCL
UK DRI at UCL
The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the biggest UK initiative supporting research to fill the major knowledge gap in our basic understanding of the diseases that cause dementia.
Research from UK DRI at UCL covers the journey from the patient to the laboratory and back to the patient with improved diagnosis, biomarkers and candidate therapies put to the test.
Project: This PhD project will investigate how astrocytes and microglia contribute to synaptic loss and aggregate pathology in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
It is becoming increasingly clear that non-neuronal cells critically contribute to region-specific synapse loss and dysfunction in AD. While microglia are emerging as the central cellular mediators of synapse elimination (for e.g., Hong et al., Science 2016, Rueda-Carrasco et al., EMBOJ 2023, De Schepper et al., Nature Neuroscience 2023, Crowley et al., bioRxiv 2024), our recent work suggests that astrocytes may act upstream to confer the region-specific synapse vulnerability (Sokolova et al., bioRxiv 2024). Mechanistically, we find that these astrocytes, which have marked dysfunctional perisynaptic processes, secrete MFG-E8, which then promote microglial synapse engulfment and synapse loss in their local milieu.
The PhD project will build on these findings and aim to uncover astrocyte-microglia crosstalk in AD. The student will dissect molecular mechanisms underlying this cell-cell crosstalk including MFG-E8 using various cutting-edge tools in post-mortem human tissues, human cells and various mouse models including spatial transcriptomics, single-cell transcriptomics, subcellular or secretome proteomics, in vivo manipulation tools, and/or super-resolution microscopy.
Eligibility: Applicants who have or expect to obtain a 1st class honours or an upper 2:1 in their undergraduate degree in neuroscience, neuroimmunology, immunology, molecular biology, biomedical sciences or related disciplines, as well as a significant level of wet-lab research experience in biology or related field. An MSc/MRes is favoured but not a pre-requisite.
How to Apply: An application is made by emailing your CV, two letters of support from current/previous research supervisors/faculty, academic transcripts and a personal statement to [email protected]. Your personal statement should be no longer than one side of A4 and should detail your interest in the lab and the project. We require that these FIVE documents are submitted in one merged PDF file labelled as SURNAME_FIRST NAME_PD_QSION.pfd. No other documents will be accepted.
The studentship is funded through the Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) for 4 years and will cover UK university tuition fees (home fees only). The studentship will also pay an annual stipend based on the standard ARUK set stipend rate.