A single-cell atlas of the Euglena gracilis cell cycle (HALL_E27DTP)

Euglena gracilis is one of biology’s outliers. This single-celled protist diverged from plants and animals over a billion years ago, switches effortlessly between photosynthesis and feeding, and carries a genome stitched together from multiple ancient endosymbionts. It controls its genes in ways that break the textbook rules: trans-splicing, a modified DNA base (base J), and heavy reliance on post-transcriptional control rather than classical promoters.

Despite growing industrial interest in Euglena as a sustainable source of biofuels, bioplastics and nutraceuticals, we still barely understand how it orchestrates gene expression (1) .

This PhD will change that. You will build the first single-cell atlas of Euglena, profiling thousands of individual cells to reconstruct the waves of gene expression that sweep across the cell cycle, and asking how this programme is rewired by light and temperature. Bulk transcriptomics averages over millions of cells and hides this choreography; single-cell approaches pioneered in this project should reveal it. (2, 3)

You will be trained across the full pipeline: culturing and imaging Euglena, developing single-cell RNA-sequencing workflows, and reconstructing the cell cycle computationally. There is real scope to follow your own questions, testing hypotheses about which pathways switch on, when, and why.

The project will be conducted at the Earlham Institute, a world-class BBSRC research centre of excellence in genomics, engineering and computational biology, and AI. You will join a collaborative and supportive research community with access to training and career development opportunities through the Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership.

This project suits a curious, quantitative graduate excited to work at both the bench and the keyboard, and who wants to help crack the biology of one of the most unusual cells on Earth.

We welcome applicants from the biological, computational or physical sciences.

References:
1. Ebenezer et al (2022) Euglena International Network (EIN): Driving euglenoid biotechnology for the benefit of a challenged world 11(11):bio059561. doi: 10.1242/bio.059561
2. Sebé-Pedrós et al (2025) The Biodiversity Cell Atlas: mapping the tree of life at cellular resolution. 645 877-885. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09312-4.
3. Dogga SK, et al (2024) A single cell atlas of sexual development in Plasmodium falciparum. Science. 384(6695):eadj4088. doi: 10.1126/science.adj4088