Bioinformatician
Contract length: FTC until 30/03/2027
Salary: £38,500 - £40,000
About the Role
Ruminant produce methane through their digestion process, mainly enteric fermentation in their rumen, where methanogen organisms break down carbohydrates into gases like methane, which is released through belches and to a lesser extent through flatulence. The methane emissions from livestock, particularly cattle, significantly contribute to global warming.
This project aims to provide the functional proof of concept for a vaccine against methanogens in cattle, supporting targeted knowledge-based vaccine development and selection. To accomplish this, we will apply existing techniques and pipelines, developed to characterise cattle antibody responses to vaccines, to generate, isolate, characterise, and engineer methanogen-specific antibodies.
The institute is looking for a postdoctoral scientist to execute and continue to develop bioinformatics pipelines to analyse transcriptomic data, and antibody single cell and whole repertoire sequencing data in cattle. This post is funded by The Bezos Earth Fund. The research will involve refining the analysis of existing and future high-throughput sequencing data to examine the overall antibody response to vaccination.
Main duties and responsibilities:
Combining different datasets to identify and characterize antigen-specific immune responses (85%):
- Characterise and compare antibody transcripts from high-throughput sequencing data obtained with different platforms (Illumina MiSeq and NextSeq; 10X chromium-generated data, Nanopore and PacBio), using existing pipelines.
- Adapt and optimise existing pipelines as needed.
- Combine single-cell transcriptomic, antibody NGS sequencing, and mass spectrometry datasets to characterize antigen-specific B cell subsets and antigen-specific antibodies.
Presentation at Internal and External Meetings (5%):
- Prepare and deliver presentations on research findings at both internal lab meetings and external scientific conferences.
- Engage in discussions with colleagues and collaborators to disseminate research progress and solicit feedback.
- Integrate developed tools for community access, on appropriate repositories.
Keeping Up to Date with Techniques and Literature (5%):
- Stay abreast of the latest developments in analysis pipeline and tools for antibody sequences analysis, and related methodologies through literature review and attendance at scientific seminars and conferences.
- Incorporate new techniques and approaches into analyses to enhance project outcomes.
Maintaining Accurate Records of Progress (5%):
- Maintain meticulous records of experimental procedures, results, observations and databases in compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Contribute to the preparation of research manuscripts by providing detailed documentation of experimental methodologies and outcomes.
This job description is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role. The jobholder will carry out any other duties as may be reasonably required by his/her line manager. The job description and personal specification may be reviewed on an ongoing basis in accordance with the changing needs of The Pirbright Institute.
Essential/Desirable requirements
Essential
- A PhD or equivalent in a relevant branch of biosciences.
- Significant and relevant experience in a recognised R&D environment.
- Experience with high-throughput sequencing data analysis.
- Working knowledge of Unix and Linux operating systems with bash scripting.
- Strong experience in at least one programming language.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills.
- A publication records commensurate to the applicant’s career stage.
Desirable
- Strong experience in building and deploying distributed pipelines for data science.
- A good understanding or experience of working with either antibodies or other variable immune genes.
- A good understanding of Python and R.
- Experience working with a high-performance cluster.
- Experience proteomics data analysis.
If you wish to find out more, or have any questions, please contact jobs [at] pirbright [dot] ac [dot] uk.