The department of molecular biotechnology within the Institute of Biology at Leiden University is looking for research scientists to work within the frame of the COMMUNITY project led by Prof. Gilles van Wezel. You will be part of a large team of scientists, with expertise ranging from (molecular) microbiology to systems biology, bioinformatics, metabolomic, natural product chemistry and cell biology.

Actinobacteria are Gram-positive bacteria with a complex mycelial lifestyle, which reproduce via spore formation. They are known as Nature’s medicine makers, producing a wealth of bioactive natural products with clinical, biotechnological and agricultural applications, including 70% of the antibiotics. Of the Actinobacteria, streptomycetes are particularly prolific antibiotic producers. Despite this wonderful source of medicines, infectious diseases are becoming increasingly difficult to treat due to the rapid spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and new antibiotics are sorely needed. Genome sequencing has revealed a huge repository of yet unexplored genes for bioactive molecules, and only a small percentage of the chemical space of natural products has likely been identified. These genes are organised in biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), and many of these BGCs are silent or cryptic under routine laboratory conditions. We aim to understand the regulatory networks that control global gene expression in Streptomyces, and that of primary metabolism, specialised metabolism (antibiotics) and development in particular. To understand the triggers and cues that activate antibiotic production and development of streptomycetes, we investigate the natural habitat of the bacteria. In the laboratory streptomycetes are typically grown in isolation and on simple carbon sources like glucose or maltose, while in nature they grow on a mixture of complex carbon sources like cellulose, starch and chitin, and live in interaction and competition with other bacteria and fungi and in association with plants and other eukaryotic hosts. Within the COMMUNITY project funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC), we aim to greatly augment our knowledge of the transcription factor networks using state of the art systems biology approaches such as ChIP-seq, Dap-seq, multiDAP combined with Crispr-based genome editing, transcriptomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics. COMMUNITY is an open science project that will study the potential of yet unexplored BGCs as source of novel bioactive compounds for application in agriculture and human health.
Four positions are available in our laboratory. A PhD student (Bionformatics and molecular biology) will work on unraveling the global regulatory networks that control carbon metabolism in soil and in the laboratory, and analyse how this relates to the control of specialised metabolism. One postdoc (microbial cell biology) will work on novel genes that control growth and development of Streptomyces. A second postdoc (microbial ecology and natural product chemistry) will study the chemical ecology of plant-Streptomyces interactions, to unravel the plant molecules and microbial  signal transduction pathways involved. A technician will be responsible for high throughput methods and robotics, to support and carry out large-scale systems biology experiments and library screening.

 

Application deadline:
Location: Leiden, The Netherlands