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The Department of Chemistry at Umeå University, Sweden, seeks a postdoctoral fellow to the project Target-guided synthesis in bacteria. The fellowship is full-time for two years with access March 1, 2021, or by agreement.
Umeå University is among the six largest universities in Sweden with about 4000 employees and 34 000 students and the Department of Chemistry is one of the largest departments with over 200 employees. The department has three focus areas of research, biological chemistry, environmental and biogeochemistry, and technical chemistry. The department is also part of the Chemical Biological Centre in Umeå – an interdisciplinary research center for basic research in natural science. Within this environment there is also several technical platforms with important infrastructure, e.g. The Swedish Metabolomics Centre with an advanced mass spectrometry park.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 is awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier who was active at Umeå University when the CRISPR-Cas9 method was developed.
Project description
The project aims to discover new antibacterial compounds by using the concept of target-guided synthesis directly in bacterial systems. Target-guided synthesis employs two sets of building blocks with complimentary reactivity that can combine to a large amount of products. By mixing the building blocks with a target-protein that catalyses the reaction between building blocks that bind close to each other on the target, products that interfere with the protein function can form. The products are identified with mass spectroscopy. In this way we minimize the synthetic effort needed to find new antibacterial agents by only preparing building blocks and not all combinations thereof. The use of bacteria rather than purified target proteins places this project in a unique niche with great potential to improve the process of finding new antibacterial agents. This interdisciplinary project involves both organic synthesis, development of advanced mass spectroscopy methods, and microbiology. The studies will initially involve synthesis of building blocks and detection of products in an E. Coli model system.
The tax-free stipend is SEK 288 000 per year and funded by the Kempe Foundations.
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