PhD or Post-Doc in Bacteriophage Engineering

at  VIB

ABOUT VIB - ABOUT THE CENTER/LAB

VIB is a research institute spread over six university campuses in Flanders that aims to strengthen the excellence of Flemish life sciences research and to turn the results into new economic growth.
Within VIB, the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology is located on the Brussels campus of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and hosts 10 PIs with varying expertise but all studying the structure-function relationships of proteins and macromolecular complexes. They further apply this expertise in projects and industrial collaborations aimed at valorisation. For this, the expertise on structural biology and protein chemistry is combined with cellular and in vivo work.
The Loris lab has 25 years of expertise in molecular microbiology via the study of bacterial toxin-antitoxin systems and has recently shifted its interest to include engineering bacteriophages in the context of developing improved strategies for phage therapy.

JOB DESCRIPTION

The increasing problems with bacterial resistance against antibiotics has led to a renewed interest in bacteriophage therapy. A major limitation for phage therapy, however, is the typically very narrow host ranges of phages that are isolated from nature. This means that novel phages need to be found in nature for essentially every clinical case that one aims to treat in this manner. The project in which you will be involved deals with engineering of bacteriophages to enlarge their host range by allowing infection and killing in a non-natural host. the work will involve applying cloning and molecular biology techniques as well as evaluation of phage efficacy in various hosts complemented with in vitro interaction studies.
In addition to the work directly related to the research, the successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the department’s emanation of science in society and to the training of master students. For PhD students, this is an obligatory part of their doctoral training program. The position is immediately available.

Please refer the Job description for details