Research Fellow In Synthetic Genomics

Description:

We are looking for an ambitious and talented research fellow to work on an exciting new synthetic genomics project engineering synthetic plant artificial chromosomes (synPACs). The long-term ambition of this project is to develop critically needed synthetic chromosome technologies to program and engineer plants at scale, with a view to transforming plant science, breeding and agriculture. Several bottlenecks currently prevent these advances, notably genome-scale design, big DNA assembly, high-capacity DNA delivery to plant cells, and artificial chromosome formation. To achieve our ambitious targets, we will not only need to address bottlenecks from a proof-of-concept point of view, but rather develop a robust, flexible and reproducible engineering ecosystem to allow programming plants at will and at scale. We will establish these technologies directly in potato (Solanum tuberosum), yielding tangible improvements to the world’s most important non-grain food crop that is central to global food security, but with a future view to deploy the engineering pipeline to other plant species.