Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Graduate job readiness and the mismatch of expectations between employers and educational providers on the role and requirements of industry training provision are key issues facing the creative industries. This project proposes that educational providers need to move beyond chasing rapidly changing technology and business practice and concentrate on preparing young people to co-produce skills through formal training, work experience and informal practice, designed and delivered in partnership with industry. This project will bring researchers, employers, and creative practitioners together to establish a new international network and identify best practice to support young people to become creative talents. Team members' mutual visits to Liverpool and Shanghai will create opportunities to establish new business partnerships, develop education and industrial training provisions, and create a joint programme of research into creative career paths, which will increase the flow of creative talent in and between the UK and China. Two international consortiums will be held in Shanghai and Liverpool. They will provide space for different key stakeholders (researchers, students, creative practitioners and employers) to share their perspectives, expectations, and practices to develop creative talents, and identify innovative practices that are culturally-specific and can be used to develop training provisions. This will lead to rich opportunities for research-industry exchanges between Liverpool and Shanghai, building on the two cities' shared heritage and strong political, cultural and economic relations. The proposed activities will also form the basis for a future major research grant application on developing international creative talents, for example ESRC Research Grant.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The increasing incidence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens has resulted in an urgent need for new, clinically useful antibiotics. Most of the antibiotics used in medicine are produced by actinomycetes, and particularly a genus of harmless bacteria called Streptomyces, which is abundant in all soil environments. Based on their genome sequences, each Streptomyces species has the potential to produce on average around 10-15 antibacterial agents of natural product origin. However, when these species are grown under laboratory conditions, only one or two antimicrobial compounds are usually detected. This is because most of these antibiotic gene clusters appear dormant (i.e. are not expressed) under laboratory conditions. The fact Streptomyces species maintain these intact antibiotic gene clusters in their genomes suggest the products are useful in nature, probably to attack competitor microorganisms in the harsh soil environment. These dormant or cryptic antibiotic gene clusters represent an untapped resource in terms of novel chemistry which could lead to the discovery of new antimicrobial compounds that could be very useful in the clinic. Preliminary work leading to this research proposal has allowed us to grow two of these Streptomyces species, for the first time, in ecologically relevant environments including sterile and non-sterile soils. This project aims to understand when previously uncharacterised antibiotic gene clusters encoded within the genomes of these Streptomyces species are expressed and produced in more natural environments. The data generated will provide us with key information which will allow us to generate genetically modified strains with the ability to produce detectable amounts of these compounds under laboratory and industrial fermentation conditions. The aims of this research are: 1. To identify how these cryptic antibiotics are made by Streptomyces species in soil. 2. To detect which cryptic antibiotics are produced under ecologically relevant conditions. 3. To use the information obtained in objectives 1 and 2 in order to generate genetically modified Streptomyces variants with the ability to produce detectable amounts of these new antibiotics under laboratory and fermentation conditions. To accomplish these aims we will use RNA sequencing, a technique used to identify which genes are being expressed under a particular growth condition. This will allow us to relate genes that are co-expressed and will provide the information required to identify global and specific regulators of cryptic antibiotic clusters, as well as key metabolic pathways leading to the production of these compounds. We will use chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify new antibiotics produced by the bacterial cells when grown in both sterile and non-sterile soils. We will combine the above information in order to select gene candidates involved in the production of particular cryptic antibiotics. We will then genetically manipulate these candidate genes from the bacterial genome one at a time. In some cases, we will insert extra copies of these candidate genes and in others we will delete these genes from the original genome. After each experiment, the production of that particular antibiotic will be analysed to see if these genetic changes increase production of the compound or if any new compounds are produced. This will allow us to generate variants of these Streptomyces species able to produce detectable levels of new antibiotics under laboratory conditions. The results from this work will have particular significance in the field of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as it aims to increase the number of novel natural products available to test and therefore provide many more lead candidates to take forward in order to produce much needed new clinically relevant antimicrobial compounds.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.