About the project
Psychopharmaceuticals such as antidepressants or anxiolytics are persistent pollutants that evade wastewater treatment and harm aquatic life. This project investigates how naturally occurring microbes can capture these compounds. You will identify and engineer microbial communities, using advanced chemical and microbial ecology tools, to develop scalable solutions that improve removal of priority drugs in real-world wastewater systems.
Many psychopharmaceuticals are now recognised emerging contaminants that cannot be efficiently removed by conventional wastewater treatment processes. This is a pressing issue, as antidepressant dispensing in England has reached record highs, with 92.6 million items prescribed in 2024/25. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are the primary entry point for psychopharmaceuticals into the environment, as conventional treatment processes fail to efficiently remove many of these drugs. Their chemical stability, low biodegradability and trace-level concentrations hinder effective removal, making the development of improved treatment strategies increasingly urgent.
Recent evidence shows that various human gut bacteria can bioaccumulate several psychopharmaceuticals to remarkably high intracellular levels. Many of these microbes also enter WWTPs, suggesting that naturally occurring microbial communities could be harnessed to enhance contaminant removal if the most effective bioaccumulators can be identified and optimised. Our team has developed and published a bioorthogonal click-chemistry platform that enables fluorescent tagging of alkyne-modified pharmaceutical derivatives. Coupling this approach with fluorescence-activated cell sorting and high-throughput sequencing enables precise identification of bioaccumulating microbes within complex microbiomes.
This project will build on these advances to identify and engineer microbial communities capable of efficiently bioaccumulating psychopharmaceuticals in WWTPs. It will also establish mass spectrometry-based methods to quantify removal efficiency, with potential future applications in pharmaceutical pollution surveillance. Finally, the project will test pilot scale bioremediation strategies using these engineered communities, to enhance scalability and operational feasibility under real-world conditions.
Training
This project is being advertised as part of the Engineering Biology for Environmental Applications Doctoral Focal Award, led by Cranfield University.
You will be embedded within the Schools of Biological Sciences and Chemistry at the University of Southampton, where you will receive interdisciplinary training in a broad range of experimental techniques, including chemical synthesis and analysis, fluorescence microscopy, fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), microbial cultivation, next-generation sequencing (NGS), and reactor-based experimental systems. You will be integrated into the Microbiology Research theme and the National Biofilms Innovation Centre, providing access to a broad network of microbiologists, seminar programmes, and opportunities to audit specialist modules.
You will be further supported by specialist input from the co-supervisor and team at Cranfield University, providing additional expertise and training in bioengineering approaches and wastewater treatment processes. In addition, a placement at the National Measurement Laboratory will provide you with dedicated training in analytical methods for the measurement of psychopharmaceutical compounds.
Supervisors
In addition to being supervised by Dr Fatima Pereira (lead supervisor) and Dr Sam Thompson from the University of Southampton, you will also be supervised by:
- Professor Frederic Coulon, Cranfield Water Science Institute, Cranfield University
- Dr Christopher McElroy, LGC – National Measurement Laboratory
