New postdoctoral researcher opening for CEPAMS collaboration
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Researcher to work on a collaborative project between the laboratories of Professor Anne Osbourn (John Innes Centre) and Dr Yang Bai (Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Beijing).
The successful candidate will be based at the John Innes Centre but will also visit Dr Bai’s lab at IGDB to carry out key aspects of this work relating to microbiome analysis.
This project is funded by the John Innes Centre – Chinese Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence in Plant and Microbial Science Alliance (CEPAMS).
The role
Building on recently published work from the Osbourn and Bai labs (‘A specialized metabolic network selectively modulates Arabidopsis root microbiota’ Science 10 May 2019:Vol. 364, Issue 6440, eaau6389), the successful candidate will investigate the impact of the environment on production of host metabolites that sculpt root microbial communities. Specifically, they will:
- Use available in silico transcriptome resources to investigate the expression of Arabidopsis biosynthetic gene clusters in roots in response to different abiotic and biotic stresses and verify the effects of different environmental conditions on gene expression experimentally by qPCR. The impact of different environmental stresses on root microbial communities in wild type Arabidopsis will be established by root microbiome sequencing. The impact of mutation/overexpression of triterpene pathway genes on root microbiota establishment and plant fitness under different environmental conditions will then be investigated
- Carry out in vitro tests of the effects of purified Arabidopsis root triterpenes on the growth of representative bacterial strains cultured from the Arabidopsis soil microbiota and evaluate the effects of different microbial strains on plant growth and development
- Investigate the impact of different triterpenes (avenacins) on root microbiome establishment in oat using a suite of available thoroughly characterised avenacin pathway mutants. These experiments will reveal the role of the avenacin pathway in regulating oat root microbiota and enable comparisons to be made with findings for Arabidopsis
The closing date for applications will be 27 June 2019.
