PhD Project: Bacteriophage Bioinformatics

Jobs in Structural Biology and Related Fields PhD Project:
New Tools for Bacteriophage Bioinformatics

The Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Germany

Bacteriophages have a huge impact on microbial communities, including our gut microbiomes. Due to their enormous effective population sizes, their protein sequences often diverge beyond recognition despite conserving similar structures and functions. This creates major challenges for sequence-based structure and function prediction.

In this project, you will develop a software platform for:

• Detecting phage genetic modules (groups of neighboring genes/proteins participating in the same pathway or function)
• Functional annotation of phage proteins using these modules
• Phage classification and taxonomy based on genetic modules

The platform will build upon our widely used tools:

• MMseqs2
• Foldseek

You will be part of an exciting French-German collaboration involving research groups in Paris, Jena, and Göttingen!

Who should apply?

• Interest in machine learning, statistics, or computational biology
• Quantitative mindset and enthusiasm for developing novel bioinformatics methods