User:Mabentley
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About me
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I am a first DPhil student in the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Oxford.
My research
I use Pseudomonas bacteria as model organisms to explore why social behaviours persist in nature in spite of strong selection for 'defector' or 'cheating' type behaviour. In particular, my research focuses on the gene regulatory networks involved in promoting social behaviours, and explores the extent to which pleiotropy is involved in these processes. Having been trained in the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre, my research is interdisciplinary in nature. I use:
- Experiments
- to test hypotheses about how bacteria regulate social traits. I investigate which genes promote social behaviour, and which antagonise it. I monitor the types of environments and growth contexts that enable ‘cheating’ phenotypes to invade a wild-type population, and use competition experiments to explore the relative fitness of these phenotypes.
- Bioinformatics
- to trace the origins of social regulation in bacteria. I use comparative genomics to explore how gene regulatory networks that promote social behaviours have evolved, and the degree to which they are under different types of selection (purifying/neutral/positive) in different lineages.
- Models
- parameterised by data from the aforementioned to validate hypotheses in a wider context and at a more abstract level. Inferences from these models feedback into my experiments, and inform me on which hypotheses are likely to be useful to test.