We are faced with meeting the agricultural demands of a growing population estimated to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050 on soils depleted of essential nutrients, with declining yields and a projected reduction in future rainfall in key agricultural regions. A circular economy between agriculture and organic waste streams can recycle essential resources for farming through the recovery of water, biomass, and nutrients from sanitation waste solids, effluents, and livestock manure at scale. This offers benefits to agroecological practices in farming by reducing the reliance on chemical fertiliser inputs with multiple benefits that improve soil health, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming, and reduce water pollution in drainage from fields. However, there are potential risks and challenges associated with this solution and these need to be fully understood to enable resource recovery to operate in a safe and sustainable manner in the long term. Firstly, the gastrointestinal tracts of humans and animals are a source of pathogens to the environment and agriculture food chain. So, reusing these wastes could potentially spread these pathogens to the food crops we consume. Secondly, manure and sewage are sources of veterinary and medical chemicals to the environment; these compounds can enhance a microbe's ability to resist treatment drugs, such as antibiotics. This ability to resist treatment drugs can spread to other microbes important for plant, animal, and human diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health crisis that is predicted to cause 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Currently, livestock and the environment are recognised as reservoirs of antimicrobial resistant microbes and implicated in the dissemination of these AMR microbes. Science-based methods to assess the environmental, livestock and human health risks of combined exposure to antimicrobial selective compounds and AMR microbes are therefore central to fully realising the potential benefits of a sanitation-agriculture circular economy. Models, analytical tools, and quantitative assessment methods to understand, measure and assess the impacts of agricultural exposure routes urgently warrant scientific attention. Through understanding the safety risks recycling waste streams pose, new interventions can be devised to minimise these risks, making resource recycling a viable mechanism to increase soil and farm productivity. Working with water utility companies and the National Pig Centre, we will investigate how water and farm waste can be recycled to be used in agriculture. Using laboratory models, we will identify where pathogens and chemicals aggregate along the different waste streams, thus identify where interventions need to be made. Using this information, we will define a risk assessment analysis to tackle pathogen and chemical buildup. We propose to build on the 'one-health, one environment' approach to AMR by acknowledging the connectivity between humans, animals and the environment. This project will support the development of a UK sanitation-circular economy and build a UK-led innovation network with global reach. The overall aim of the project is to build a community of educational, industry, farming, and government colleagues to increase the capacity of the UK to address global pollution challenges associated with adopting a circular economy to support agricultural production. A circular economy approach is essential in meeting global agricultural needs, especially enhancing the role that farming can play in climate control and our need to move towards Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions. This proposal will pave the way in achieving this goal whilst minimising the impact of utilising waste materials on the environment and animal and human health.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the most critical challenges facing science in the 21st century. For decades we have benefited from the widespread availability of drugs to treat a variety of conditions using antibiotics with penicillin becoming one of the most recognizable drugs in terms of public awareness. However, through the natural evolution of pathogens, accelerated by the over-use of antimicrobial drugs, the effectiveness of current treatments to such interventions is reducing. Indeed the emergence of pathogens which are fully resistant to antimicrobial drugs, though limited, is becoming an increasing trend. As a direct result of the serious implications and threats this poses the UK has established a 5-year AMR challenge to researchers, mirrored internationally, to address these issues. In considering AMR it is important that the risk to human health from the emergence of AMR in livestock is also recognized and addressed. The use of antibiotics in this context is also widespread, and the emergence of AMR is occurring as seen in human pathogens. Given the food chain, and environmental factors such as waste treatment and run-off, there is significant risk that this may offer a pathway for the translation of AMR pathogens from animals into humans. Much of the study into AMR and its emergence has naturally been undertaken by researchers within the life sciences. However, researchers within the engineering and physical sciences (EPS) have for many years contributed strongly to the development of life and medical sciences through the development of new characterization tools, advanced mathematical modelling techniques, and through the development of increasingly smart sensors to give a few examples. There is therefore significant scope for engaging EPS researchers directly with addressing the AMR challenges with the aim of accelerating the development of new techniques and tools for identifying and addressing the problem. This project will create a space in which we will bring together researchers from the EPS community, including many leaders of their field, with those directly tackling AMR research challenges in the life sciences. We will do this through the creation of a Collaborative Hub for Advancing Interdisciplinary Research (CHAIR) at the University of Surrey. This CHAIR will be based in the newly established School of Veterinary Medicine, providing a neutral space to engage with researchers from across the EPS Departments within the University. To support and facilitate collaborations focused on addressing the AMR challenges we will run a series of integrated seminars, workshops and networking events which will lead to 'sandpits' at which researchers will work to propose short collaborative projects. Successful projects will then be eligible to apply to receive further funding with the aim of generating full research proposal submissions to funding bodies on the AMR challenges. We will also provide support in terms of research time to short projects, funds for short-term missions to support researcher interaction and information exchange, and network formation. A series of researcher development and training activities will be offered in collaboration with the University's Researcher Development Programme. We will also closely engage with a number of strategic partners including the Defra Animal and Plant Health Agency, the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), The Royal Surrey County Hospital, and internationally at North Carolina State University (USA) including supporting a short-term visiting appointment, and Universidad Sao Paulo (Brazil). This will significantly extend the potential impact of the activities we will support and provide new opportunities for wider collaboration.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major public health concern as the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria increasingly reduces the effectiveness of our most widely used antibiotics in the treatment of bacterial diseases. The current revolution in biosciences is creating new tools that offer the chance to tackle AMR issues in the environment and create 'future-proof' technologies for new areas of application, targeting AMR issues. Successful exploitation depends on combining an enhanced understanding of the fundamental science with an ability to apply and deploy in the field for real-time monitoring to better understand the emergence and dissemination of AMR in the environment. The Anglo-Canadian Collaboration on Antimicrobial resistance (ACCAMAR) thus aims to strengthen the links between those working at the forefront of microbial genomics, metabolic capabilities, and community interactions; and those designing next-generation environmental protection technologies and human risk exposure and mitigations.

Antibiotics are used extensively to fight bacterial infections and have saved millions of lives. However, the bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics and some antibiotics have stopped working. We refer to this as antimicrobial resistance - AMR. We don't just use antibiotics for people; similar amounts are given to farm animals. More than 900 million farm animals are reared every year in the UK and antibiotic treatments are vital for their welfare, for farms as businesses, and for us to enjoy affordable food. However, farms may be contributing to the development of AMR. The aim of this project is to improve our understanding of how farm practice, especially the way in which manure is handled, could lead to AMR in animal and human pathogens. This understanding will help farmers and vets find new ways to reduce AMR, without harming their animals or their businesses. For research purposes, Nottingham University maintains a typical high performance dairy farm - its 200 cows produce a lot of milk and a lot of manure. The waste is stored in a 3 million litre slurry tank, any excess goes into a 7 million litre lagoon. This slurry is applied to fields as organic fertilizer. Cow manure contains many harmless bacteria but some, e.g. E. coli O157, can cause severe infection in people. When cows get sick they are treated with antibiotics. Udder infections are treated by injection of antibiotics into the udder. Since this milk contains antibiotics, it cannot be sold but is discarded into the slurry. Foot infections are treated with an antibacterial footbath, which is also emptied into the slurry tank. As a result, slurry tanks contain a mixture of bacteria, antibiotics and other antimicrobials that are stored for many months. The bacteria that survive in the presence of antibiotics are more likely to have antibiotic resistance. This resistance is encoded in their genes so passed to the next generation. Worse still, the genes can be passed on to other bacteria in the slurry. Before we wrote this proposal, we investigated our own farm's slurry tank to see if this might be happening. We tested 160 E. coli strains from the slurry; most carried antibiotic resistance. We also found antibiotics in the tank - including some that bacteria were resistant to. Our mathematical modellers showed that reducing spread of resistance genes in the tank might be more effective in preventing resistance than cutting the use of antibiotics. Conversations with the farm vets revealed that they knew about AMR and had changed some of their antibiotic prescriptions. But these analyses leave us with more questions than answers. In this project, we want to find out if current farming methods are contributing to the development of harmful antibiotic-resistant bacteria in slurry, bacteria that may then be encountered by humans and animals. To do this, we need to integrate scientific and cultural approaches: - What bacteria are in the slurry? How many are harmful? What resistance genes do they carry? How do these genes spread? - How long do antibiotics remain in the tank? Do they degrade? - What happens to the bacteria and antibiotics after they are spread on fields? - How do farmers, vets and scientists interpret evidence about AMR? What are their hidden assumptions? Can we improve collaborative decision making on AMR risk management? - Can we reduce resistance by avoiding mixing together bacteria and antimicrobials in slurry? - Can we predict the risk of emergence of and exposure to resistant pathogens? Can we predict which interventions are likely to be most effective to reduce AMR, taking into account both human and scientific factors? Through this research, we will learn what can realistically be done to reduce this risk; not just on this farm, but UK wide. We will work with farmers, vets and policy makers to ensure that our results will make a difference to reducing the risk of harmful AMR bacteria arising in agriculture.