Act soon! Deadline: 28 April 2024
This position is funded by a BBSRC Engineering Biology Award and is based at the Department of Microbial Sciences, University of Surrey – Project Supervisor: Professor Claudio Avignone Rossa. Start date: June 2024. Duration: 24 months.
The project aims to utilise Engineering Biology approaches for the development of transferable strategies to engineer antibiotic-producing Streptomyces bacteria able to use a wide range of sustainable feedstocks for production of drug molecules. To deliver this mission they will integrate ‘wet ’and ‘dry ’laboratory data from an authentic industrial Streptomyces strain lineage. They will determine how the strain improvement process has driven strains to adapt to specific media and fermentation conditions and then use this information to build, design and test appropriate engineering strategies for the development and construction of Streptomyces strains that use greener carbon sources. This will ultimately enable them to learn how to rationally design of strains for greener manufacturing and make the strategy broadly applicable to other industrial Streptomyces.
This is a collaboration between the University of Strathclyde, the University of Surrey and GSK. The study has received a grant of just under £1.1 million from the UKRI Technology Missions Fund, with support from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
They are looking for a Research Fellow with expertise in metabolic modelling and computational biology and their application for the analysis of metabolism and the design of strategies for improving the properties of microbial strains. The appointed researcher will design and construct metabolic models based on the information collected from multi-omics experiments carried out by the collaborators, and suggest and propose experiments to select the best producing species and test their performance under diverse culture conditions.
The researcher will liaise, train, and exchange skills and methodology with colleagues from related projects, and will be involved in coaching and supervision of undergraduate and post-graduate researchers. There will be opportunities to collaborate with world-class researchers at other leading academic institutions, as well as with our industrial partners.
Full details of the project and the application procedure can be found in the University of Surrey’s pages here: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=017024
Potential candidates interested in discussing details of the project should contact Professor Claudio Avignone Rossa (c.avignone-rossa@surrey.ac.uk).