Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Biology / Comparative Genomics

Project — Biological conflicts and the evolution of poly-immunity loci: uncovering
processes and functional relationships

We are seeking a motivated postdoctoral researcher to investigate the evolution and
distribution of proteins involved in inter-organismal conflicts. Immunity proteins and
the toxins they neutralize are extraordinarily diverse in sequence and structure, thus
making these proteins largely invisible to conventional homology searches. This project
aims to combine remote homology search methods , structure-based phylogenetics,, and
gene-neighborhood/network analysis to map loci of interest across bacterial lineages.
The goal is to discover novel toxin–antitoxin systems and to understand how bacterial
defense repertoires are organized across environments and conflict pressures.