About the Project
Can diet and metabolism genuinely slow the pace of ageing, not just extend life but reprogram the biological clock that measures it? This project puts you at the centre of one of the most exciting open questions in ageing biology, using epigenetic clocks, the most accurate biomarker of biological age currently available, to find out.
Numerous drugs have already been shown to extend lifespan in mice and slow their epigenetic clocks. What's still unknown is how: do these compounds work by directly reprogramming the epigenome, or through separate metabolic routes that only look connected? Answering that question demands a model where lifespan and epigenetic change can both be tracked fast and at scale, something mammalian systems simply can't offer.
That's where Nasonia vitripennis, the jewel wasp, comes in. It combines the short generation time and experimental tractability of an invertebrate with genuine mammalian-like DNA methylation, making it a uniquely powerful system for dissecting epigenetic ageing at pace. You'll work with an established high-throughput pipeline for lifespan and healthspan assays, Oxford Nanopore sequencing for base-resolution DNA methylation, and CUT&Tag for histone marks, testing whether interventions shift both lifespan and the rate of epigenetic ageing. You'll then apply advanced statistical and machine learning methods to build and refine epigenetic clocks directly from your own data.
This is frontier ageing research with real translational stakes: the tools and findings you generate will help establish new invertebrate models for anti-ageing drug discovery, a field currently starved of fast, scalable systems. If you're drawn to big mechanistic questions, want to work at the cutting edge of genomics technology, and want your PhD to produce results with a real shot at shaping the future of healthy ageing, this project will give you the model system, the tools, and the training to make that happen.
Techniques that will be undertaken during the project
You'll gain hands-on training in biological data science: building statistical models to analyse lifespan experiments, developing machine learning epigenetic clocks, and applying quantitative genomics to large-scale sequencing data. Alongside the wet-lab work, this gives you highly transferable skills in coding, statistics, and computational biology, skills increasingly in demand across both academic and industry ageing research.
Enquiries
Project Enquiries to ebm3@le.ac.uk
Programme enquiries to mibtp-admin@leicester.ac.uk
To apply please refer to
https://le.ac.uk/study/research-degrees/funded-opportunities/bbsrc-mibtp
Funding Notes
All MIBTP students will be provided with a 4 year studentship. This includes: Tuition fees at the UK fee rate*, a tax free stipend which for 2026/7 is £21,805 per year (2027/8 stipend to be confirmed), a travel allowance over years 1-3, a travel/conference budget, a generous consumables budget, use of a laptop for the duration of the programme. The University of Leicester will provide full overseas fee waivers for the duration of their study to all international students accepted at Leicester. The funder, UKRI, allows us to appoint up to 30% overseas students.