Postdoctoral fellow in Bioinformatics – Reptilian skin coloration

The LANE laboratory (www.lanevol.org) at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) is seeking a creative and highly motivated PostDoc bioinformatician to work on reptilian skin coloration.

In the context of a highly multidisciplinary study investigating the development of skin colour patterns in snakes and lizards, we are looking for a bioinformatician active in genome analysis. The aim of the project is to perform genome mapping, as well as differential gene expression analyses based on RNAseq, for different color morphs of corn snakes and leopard geckos. The successful candidate will interact with a multidisciplinary team of physicists, computer scientists and biologists and will have access to the high-performance CPU and GPU clusters of UNIGE. The working language of the laboratory is English. The duration of the contract is one to two years.

Qualifications & skills

• PhD in bioinformatics within the last five years
• Strong inner drive, independence, willingness to work in a highly interdisciplinary team
• A good level of spoken and written English is essential
• A background in evolutionary biology is preferred, but not required. 

Laboratory. The team’s projects are interdisciplinary, and aim at understanding the genetic determinism of skin colour patterns (especially in snakes and lizards) but also skin appendages (scales, hair, and spines) in amniotes. Besides standard molecular biology methods, we use confocal and light-sheet microscopy imaging, electron microscopy, mass spectrometry and deep sequencing.

Environment. The University of Geneva (UNIGE) is highly-renowned for its research and is among the best universities in the world. Geneva is an international city occupying a privileged geographical situation.

Contact. Applicants are invited to send (combined into a single PDF document) a motivation letter with a short statement of research interests, a CV and two references (full address, incl. email and phone) to: Dr. Athanasia Tzika (athanasia.tzika@unige.ch)

Closing Date: 31 August 2023

Scientific fields: Bioinformatics

Model systems: Snakes, Lizards

Duration: Fixed term

Minimum qualifications: PhD

References

Tzika, Ullate-Agote, Zakany, Kummrow & Milinkovitch

Somitic positional information guides self-organized patterning of snake scales

Science Advances (2023)

Ullate-Agote & Tzika

Characterization of the Leucistic Texas Rat Snake Pantherophis obsoletus

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (2021)

Ullate-Agote, Burgelin, Debry, Langrez, Montange, Peraldi, Daraspe, Kaessmann, Milinkovitch & Tzika

Genome mapping of a LYST mutation in corn snakes indicates that vertebrate chromatophore vesicles are lysosome-related organelles 

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (2020)