An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Postdoctoral Researcher in Bioinformatics to join the Saunders Group at the John Innes Centre, working on cutting-edge science in plant disease diagnostics.

About the Saunders Group
The Saunders group works on a variety of emerging and re-emerging plant pathogens using a broad array of techniques that includes molecular genetics, biochemistry, plant pathology, cell biology, genomics, transcriptomics, and data mining to improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms at the plant pathogen interface.

The role
The successful candidate will work with genome sequence and RNAseq datasets to study the notorious wheat rust pathogens, which have been associated with crop failures and famine throughout history.

The appointee will lead the development of all bioinformatic elements for two projects:

• Further developing and supporting the award-winning MARPLE diagnostics system, and using this system to study wheat rust population dynamics at an international scale. The MARPLE system uses MinION sequencing to rapidly diagnose individual wheat rust strains and has been deployed across East Africa and South Asia.
• Analysing wheat rust infection RNAseq datasets. This will include further developing existing approaches in the lab that have proved extremely fruitful in using these datasets to identify new sources of wheat rust resistance. This will provide the candidate the opportunity to contribute directly to strengthening wheat resilience to rust infection.

This post provides an exciting opportunity for the candidate to work in a multidisciplinary research group in the Crop Genetics department at the JIC, whilst also working with partners across East Africa, South Asia and at the international maize and wheat improvement center, CIMMYT.