One Health: pathogen surveillance and drug discovery

Tick-borne pathogen surveillance in Saudi livestock

Ticks feed on camels and carry bacteria inside them. Some of those bacteria infect people. Almost nobody has described which ones live in Saudi camel ticks, or whether they already carry antibiotic-resistance genes. That gap is the project.

You would do every step yourself:

1. Collect ticks from camels in the field — Hail, Madinah and Riyadh.
2. Extract DNA from the ticks.
3. Detect which pathogens they carry, by PCR and by 16S rRNA sequencing.
4. Grow the bacteria and test them for antibiotic resistance.
5. Sequence the important ones and publish the result.

We have already completed this path once, from the field to a published genome. You would be extending work that is proven, not starting from nothing.

Hyalomma dromedariifunded · field work includedMicroorganisms 2026;14(7):1428

Building a living model for antimicrobial resistance

To test whether a treatment works, you need a living host. Ours is a worm, Caenorhabditis elegans — small, cheap, fast, and ethically simple.

This stream has two halves. The first is isolating and characterising native Saudi C. elegans strains from local soil, so the model organism itself is ours. The second is using that model to study infection: our Borrelia strain carries a red fluorescent tag, so you can watch the infection under the microscope.

This suits a student who wants to build a tool that the whole lab will then use.

native strain isolationRFP-tagged Borreliafeeding & killing assays

Screening compounds for antimicrobial activity

Resistant bacteria are outrunning our antibiotics. This stream searches for what might replace them, and it runs on two tracks that you can take separately or together.

At the bench: test real compounds against real resistant bacteria — plant extracts, algae extracts and silver nanoparticles, measured by MIC, MBC and biofilm assays. Our freezer holds the hard cases, including MRSA, extensively drug-resistant Acinetobacter, and one Pseudomonas aeruginosa that resisted every drug tested.

On the computer: screen Saudi native plant compounds against a target protein before anyone touches a test tube — docking, then molecular dynamics to check the binding is stable, then prediction of whether the compound would be safe and absorbable.

MIC · MBC · biofilmAutoDock Vina · GROMACSSwissADME · pkCSM135 isolates

Studying patients from records that already exist

A retrospective study asks a new question of patient records that hospitals have already collected. You do not wait for samples, you do not wait for a sequencing run, and the ethical approval is already in place before you start.

That matters for a Master's. The timeline is short, the scope is defined, and a well-run project can be published within the degree rather than after it.

Examples of the kind of study you would learn to run. These four are active in the lab, each with its own approved protocol at a Riyadh teaching hospital. You would not simply be given one — you would learn the method on it, then design your own question the same way:

1. Helicobacter pylori — infection and treatment outcome over time.
2. Urinary tract infection in children born with kidney malformation.
3. Bloodstream infection in adults.
4. Late-onset sepsis in newborn babies.

What you would learn: how to build a clean patient cohort, machine-learning prediction that can explain why it predicted something, survival analysis, and how to report a clinical study to the STROBE standard so a journal accepts it.

The analysis pipeline is already built and tested. Your year is spent on your question, not on inventing the method.

XGBoost · SHAPCox · Kaplan–MeierSTROBE reportingethics already approved