Research Fellow (108072-0524)

About the Role

For informal enquiries, please contact Dr Séamus Holden at Seamus.holden@warwick.ac.uk. 

Fixed term contract for 4 years.

Postdoctoral researcher in single molecule biophysics/ biochemistry of bacterial cell wall synthesis.

We are recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to investigate the molecular principles of bacterial cell wall synthesis using in vitro single molecule FRET and related methods. This interdisciplinary position would suit applicants from a broad range of disciplines such as biophysics, microscopy, microbiology, cell biology, biochemistry or structural biology.

Bacteria are surrounded by a mesh-like peptidoglycan cell wall which gives them their shape, protects them from bursting and is one of the best targets for antibiotics. Remarkably, we know very little about how the protein complexes that build the cell wall function at a molecular level.

The goal of your project is to reveal key biophysical principles by which a multi-protein complex called the elongasome [1,2] functions as nanoscale molecular machine to construct the bacterial cell wall. You will focus on using in vitro single molecule FRET spectroscopy and microscopy to investigate the dynamics and synthetic activity of individual elongasome proteins.

The position will be based in the group of Séamus Holden at the University of Warwick. The post is for 4 years, with possible extension to 5 years. You will work closely with the groups of David Roper (microbial biochemistry, Warwick), Phill Stansfeld (computational biophysics, Warwick) and Stephen Cochrane (synthetic chemistry, Queens University Belfast).

For more information, please contact Séamus Holden (seamus.holden@warwick.ac.uk) or visit the lab website (https://holdenlab.github.io/).

[1] Nygaard et al, Nat. Commun. 14 (2023) 5151. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40483-8  

[2] Middlemiss, BioRxiv (2023) https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.10.540107.

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