June 2025: Congratulations to Amy Pickering, Sophie Giguere and Nelly Olova from the University of Edinburgh who have been awarded fellowships from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as part of a £9 million investment in future science leaders. Amy Pickering, Roslin Institute (left), Sophie Giguere, School of Biological Sciences (middle) and Nelly Olova, School of Biological Sciences (right). The BBSRC's prestigious 2024 Fellowships scheme is supporting 19 researchers in medicine, agriculture and bio-inspired engineering.The fellowship programme empowers outstanding early-career scientists, giving them the freedom to pursue bold ideas with the potential for lasting impact. Dissecting bacterial abscess formation for vaccine design Amy Pickering's fellowship will focus on development of vaccines to target the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) which is a major cause of mastitis in ruminants.This bacterial infection generates a £120 million economic cost to UK sheep farmers annually as well as being a food security concern.To create an effective S. aureus vaccine targeting mastitis, researchers first need to understand what bacterial factors to target and how to promote an effective immune response.Amy's fellowship will explore bacterial components involved in abscess formation and assess their potential as vaccine targets. It will also investigate how sheep immune cells interact with these bacteria, using advanced techniques to uncover markers of effective immunity. This BBSRC Fellowship will provide advances in our understanding of how Staphylococcus aureus interacts with the host during sheep mastitis. Using exciting approaches such as bacterial transposon mutagenesis and single-cell transcriptomics, I aim to identify novel ways to prevent abscess formation in the udder during mastitis infection that I can take forward for vaccine testing in the future. Amy Pickering BBSRC Fellow, The Roslin Institute Investigating selective translation during the antiviral response Dr Sophie Giguere, who is based in the School of Biological Sciences, will be exploring how cells selectively produce antiviral proteins following a virus attack. Once infected, cells often shut down most protein production to stop the virus from using their machinery to replicate. However, cells still need to produce specific proteins to fight the virus. Although scientists understand how the shutdown occurs, the process that allows cells to bypass the block for producing defence proteins remains unclear. Sophie's fellowship will focus the tRNA and ribosomal populations of cells in the antiviral state, aiming to understand the impact of these components in controlling antiviral protein production and limiting viral spread. Avian epigenetic clocks as a tool to study environmental effects on ageing Dr Nelly Olova, who is also based in the School of Biological Sciences, will focus on generating molecular age estimators for birds, which will be able to measure the age of an individual bird. Those molecular tools, called ‘epigenetic clocks’, capture age-related changes in chemical marks on the DNA, which are highly sensitive to the environment and lifestyle. Once they are created, they will be used to assess how environmental and lifestyle stressors impact the rates of biological ageing.Amongst the first factors to be assessed are the effects of parasite load and viral infection on the rates of ageing, as well as how these infections affect the avian epigenome more globally. The project will leverage on a wealth of existing experimental data and samples from longitudinal studies on bird flu and infections in the group of Emma Cunningham (Ashworth Laboratories), with a main focus on the European shag. Related links Amy PickeringThe Roslin InstituteSophie GiguereNelly OlovaSchool of Biological SciencesBBSRCBBSRC announcement Publication date 10 Jun, 2025
