Leighton Pritchard#VACANCY - please RT: We have a #PDRA opportunity at SIPBS (Strathclyde Uni) on the #genomeRxiv project - an international collaboration with Vinatzer and Heath labs (Virginia Tech) and the DIB Lab (UC Davis) - apply at https://shorturl.at/iMOSZ 1/8
We're looking for an enthusiastic #bioinformatician/computational biologist (or biology-curious computer scientist) to help us on the UK side. If you might be interested, please DM or email - if you know someone who might be, please let them know - https://shorturl.at/iMOSZ 2/8
Some context: on one level, the main problem we're trying to solve is how to generate a quantitative, unbiased, uniquely-addressable scheme for organising #microbialgenomes - and this could address important practical issues: https://frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2022.887310/full 3/8
We think we have a good way to do this (#LINgroups), and are investigating fast, robust, and principled ways to populate this scheme, with tools including #sourmash and #pyani: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3535508.3545546 4/8
We are not just working towards providing an objective classification scheme, but also a service that enables users to classify their own genomes (confidentially, if necessary) https://figshare.com/articles/poster/genomeRxiv_a_microbial_whole-genome_database_for_classification_identification_and_data_sharing/14376350/1 5/8
In addition, we want to use this scheme to help resolve historical and current mismatches in #taxonomy/#nomenclature, acting as a mapping between schemes, or "Rosetta Stone" for ever-shifting classifications, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.005037 6/8
We're aiming to do this not just for nomenclature, but also to associate phenotype, host range, and other traits with groups of similar genomes, and suggest #moleculardiagnostics to identify them, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000791 7/8
To get the ad out there again: if you might be interested, please DM or email - or if you know someone who might be, please let them know - https://shorturl.at/iMOSZ 8/8