Research Scientist in Metagenomics

at  Quadram Institute

Applications Close: 01 December 2024
Salary: £36,720 to £44,000 per annum depending on qualifications and experience.
Contract Length: This is a full-time post for a contract of 19 months, potentially extensible for a further 12 months
Join an ERC funded research project investigating the inheritance and evolution of human associated microbes. The project will be conducted in a multidisciplinary team at the Quadram Institute and Earlham Institutes, UK, and combine newly established patient cohorts, concomitantly developed wetlab and bioinformatics protocols that enable a unique perspective into the human gut microbiome.

How do gut bacteria colonize their human hosts and families? How do they then persist for decades in the same host? And how do they evolve and adapt to their unique human host? To answer these and follow up questions, the group received an ERC Starter grant. The aim for this post is to dissect the microbial genetics enabling human long-term colonization on a novel family centric cohort established in the UK.
High-resolution metagenomics will be used to track microbes – eukaryotic and prokaryotic – across individuals and in families, and determine genes under selection. This will include closely working with metagenomic bioinformatics (assembly, genome binning, gene predictions) and combining this with population genetics and/or network inference algorithms. Thus, exploring microbiomes at unprecedented resolution can resolve eco-evolutionary processes determining resilience and functional plasticity of our gut microbiomes. Long-term, this work will contribute to enabling personalized & data driven medicine and developing the next generation of human gut microbiome treatments.