Professor Liz Wellington, Professor of Environmental Microbiology in the School of Life Sciences, has been awarded £1,172,973 from BBSRC for her project on ‘The farm environment: an overlooked reservoir of Mycobacterium bovis?’.

M. bovis is the causative agent of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a disease that affects cattle health and welfare and has serious impacts on the agriculture industry. Uncertainty around the transmission of bTB has impeded the development of effective control measures, but recent research has suggested that indirect transmission through M. bovis in the environment may play an important role in the spread of bTB between cattle and wildlife. This project brings together interdisciplinary expertise in epidemiology, microbiology, genomics and ecology, to investigate the distribution and survival of M. bovis in the farm environment and to determine how biosecurity measures may be adjusted to limit the transmission of this harmful bacterium. The research will be carried out in collaboration with Professor Mark Pallen from Warwick Medical School, Professor Rosie Woodroffe from the ZSL Institute of Zoology, and Professor Christl Donnelly from Imperial College London.

The project was funded by BBSRC’s Eradication of bovine tuberculosis through basic research and discovery (ERADbTB) scheme, which is also supported by DEFRA and is part of the wider Research Councils UK programme in Global Food Security.