Post-doctoral fellow in protein crystallography​/computational chemistry

Organisation/Company Lunds universitet Department Lunds universitet Research Field Chemistry Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Country Sweden Final date to receive applications 2 Mar 2026 - 22:59 (UTC) Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

This post-doctoral position is part of the EU cofund research project AMBER, Advanced Multiscale Biological imaging using European Research infrastructures, will address scientific and sectoral gaps in biological imaging ranging from molecular, through cellular, to tissue, organ and organism levels of organisation, and is coordinated by LINXS Institute of advanced Neutron and X-ray Science.

AMBER is funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) COFUND scheme.

Around 15 postdocs will be recruited in the fifth call 2026, with each fellowship lasting 36 months.

AMBER has six core partners:
Lund University/MAX IV, Sweden, the European Spallation Source (ESS), Sweden, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), France, the International Institute of Molecular Mechanisms and Machines, (IMOL), Poland, and the Leicester Institute of Structural and Chemical Biology, United Kingdom.

Your work may include clinical and biomedical projects. It may also include technique development work aimed at combining imaging techniques and data analysis to provide a more integrated picture of life processes in the context of health and disease. To be a postdoc fellow at the AMBER programme you will get unprecedented medical, biological, and methodological capabilities, with a profound potential impact for Europe’s next generation of research and researchers.

When you have completed the AMBER programme you will be extraordinarily well equipped to further your career in academia, at infrastructures, in the health and Med Tech sectors, and beyond.

The interviews will start in April/May 2026. For more information about AMBER, application and evaluation process etc please visit:ambercofund.eu

The main duties involved in a post-doctoral posistion is to conduct research. Teaching may also be included, but up to no more than 20% of working hours. The position shall include the opportunity for three weeks of training in higher education teaching and learning.

Research project description – Elucidating the mechanism of triose phosphate isomerase

Dr. Esko Oksanen is an expert researcher at the Division of Computational Chemistry and an Instrument Scientist at the European Spallation Source. His research focuses on combining experimental structural information with computational techniques to understand enzyme mechanisms. Triose phosphate isomerase is a key glycolytic enzyme that catalyses a very fast keto-enol isomerisation between glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone phosphate. Hydrogen atoms play a key role in this remarkably fast process, but they are not detectable by X-ray crystallography.

Therefore we have turned to neutron crystallography to locate the hydrogens (Kelpsas et al. 2021, (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).) in inhibitor complexes. While knowledge of the protonation states is a prerequisite for mechanistic understanding, computational chemistry methods are crucial for modelling the reaction trajectory. We have previously used quantum mechanics-molecular mechanics (QM/MM) modelling to study the chemical step of the reaction, but our unpublished data from variants suggest modifications to the model we proposed in Kelpsas et al.

2021 that QM/MM is insufficient to describe. Our variant structures also point out a way to determine structures with the substrate dihydroxyacetone phosphate in a way that has previously not been feasible.

In this project – that builds on our existing neutron data – the aim is to determine an X-ray and neutron structure of triose phosphate isomerase in complex with the substrate by modifying our existing crystallisation protocols for growing large crystals. The follow-up aim is then to model the reaction trajectory…