Job number: ACAD103712

Division/School: School of Chemistry

Contract type: Open Ended

Working pattern: Full time

Salary: £33,199 - £42,036 per annum

Closing date for applications: 15-Jan-2019

A 2-year, BBSRC/EPSRC-funded, postdoctoral position is available to develop bioinformatics and computational tools for protein analysis and design. The post is in the protein design laboratory of Prof Dek Woolfson (Chemistry and Biochemistry, Bristol; https://woolfsonlab.wordpress.com/).

The post has two aspects: The first project involves the development of computational tools (bioinformatics and virtual reality (VR)) to facilitate in silico protein design. This is in collaboration with Dr Dave Glowacki (Chemistry and Computer Science, Bristol). Protein designs will be tested experimentally in the Woolfson lab. The second project involves the construction of a database for collating and interrogating atomic structures of protein-protein interactions (PPIs). This is in collaboration with Prof Andy Wilson (Chemistry, Leeds). This work will underpin experimental studies across the POPPI consortium of academic and industrial researchers (https://poppi.website/).

The protein-design work builds on the Woolfson group’s expertise in computational and experimental protein design. See: Thomson et al. (2014) Science 346, 485-488, DOI:10.1126/science.1257452; and Wood et al. (2017) Bioinformatics 33, 3043–3050, DOI:10.1093/bioinformatics/btx352. The aim is to combine this with expertise in VR and machine learning in the Glowacki group to create accessible, user-friendly tools for protein design. See: O’Connor et al. (2018) Science Advances 4, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat2731.

The work on protein-protein interactions will contribute to an on-going computational and experimental effort to understand PPIs better. This understanding will be exploited in the design of peptide and small-molecule inhibitors of PPIs important to fundamental cellular processes and implicated in disease. See: Fletcher et al. (2018) Chem Sci 9, 7656-7665, DOI:10.1039/C8SC02643B. The aim is to generate a searchable database of PPIs of use to informaticians and experimentalists to interrogate and exploit PPIs.

The position is best suited to a talented and ambitious researcher with an interest in applying bioinformatics and computational biochemistry to protein science. Essential skills for this post include: an ability to program fluently in one or more computer languages, and ideally in Python; and experience with applications of bioinformatics, databases, or computer science in biochemistry or chemistry, and ideally in protein science. Desirable skills include: experience with computational protein design, databases for protein-structure analysis, molecular modelling in virtual reality environments, and in machine learning methods applied to protein science.

For informal enquiries, please contact: d.n.woolfson@bristol.ac.uk

The closing date for applications is Tuesday 15th January 2019.

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