11. Development of innovative tools for rapid phenotypic characterisation of intraspecific diversity of Listeria monocytogenes (Joint supervision PhD)
Host Organizations BioFilm Control (France) and GenXPRO (Germany)
Objectives
1. The ESR will develop an assay to test biofilm phenotype in a large array of food processing-related environmental conditions (salt, acides, disinfectants, preservatives) in BFC facilities. He will be in charge of the development and validation of an in silico virulence assay. This assay will target specific mRNAs in order to estimate the virulence potential of strains of L. monocytogenes. Transcript targets will be selected and tested by qPCR in GXP premises. In the process of validation, virulence results of several strains collected in a humanised mouse model will be compared with the in silico analysis. Once these innovative tools will be validated, intraspecific phenotypic diversity (biofilm and virulence) will be assessed on a collection of environmental and clinical isolates of L. monocytogenes. Genotypic diversity will be assessed under the supervision of GPX.
Expected Results : Adaptation of the BioFilm Ring test R to test food processing environmental conditions. Development of an innovative in silico virulence assay surrogate to animal models. Diversity results will inform stakeholders on the level of health hazard according to the strain. This in turn will help secure food safety all along the shelf life of foodstuff.
Duration (months) 36
Contact : Dr. Thierry BERNARDI: thbe@biofilmcontrol.com
Dr. Bjorn ROTTER: rotter@genxpro.de
ELIGIBLE CRITERIA of Marie Sklokowska Curie actions:
Researchers may be of any nationality
Candidates shall at the time of recruitment by the host organization, be in the first four years (full-time equivalent research experience) of their research careers. Full-time equivalent research experience is measured from the date when a researcher obtained the degree which would formally entitle him or her to embark on a doctorate, either in the co

The C-DAC will launch Param Bio Blaze, a supercomputing facility, to address the challenges in bioinformatics on Tuesday at a three-day symposium, titled: 'Accelerating biology: Computing life'. The supercomputing facility will be inaugurated on Tuesday by Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, vice-chancellor, Central University of Hyderabad at the Yashada. The new C-DAC's facility will have a capacity of 10 teraflop and will be able to analyse human cells and its functions.

Param Bio Blaze will help have a larger storage space and better computing facility for the bioinformatics sector. The facility will help capture the movement of molecules and also interaction between two molecules and the effects.

Applications of Param BioBlaze

- Collaboration with National Centre for Cell Science for research on Malaria and understanding how the disease spreads

- Collaborative work with Tata Memorial hospital on breast cancer and find out the difference between normal tissues and tissues from breast cancer patients

- Designing anti-cancer molecules, a collaborative research with the University of Pune

Reference:

Times of India

Image:datacenterjournal.com

If you are looking for a new opportunity and have skills within any sector of Bioinformatics with an IT skill then I would love to hear from you. I have various exciting opportunities from programmers to researchers to scientists.

Call me now on 01772 278050 or email me your cv and requirements and I will call you back dareen.evans@itworkshealth.co.uk

However, the ancient invasions and migrations to slavery and trade, history is embroidered with events that led to interactions between previously separate populations. Early humans migrated due to many factors such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food supply. Historical migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about a million years ago. Homo sapiens appear to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago, moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago, and had spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 years BC. Indo-Aryan migration from the Indus Valley to the plain of the River Ganges in Northern India is presumed to have taken place in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, contemporary to the Late Harappan phase in India (ca. 1700 to 1300 BC). From 180 BC, a series of invasions from Central Asia followed, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans in the northwestern Indian subcontinent.

Using the recent advance technologies researchers have created a historical atlas of instances of such mixing. They use a sophisticated statistical method for making inferences about human history and infer populations interbredings ( happen over the past 4,000 years) with an ease.

The study published the findings and presented with an interactive map. http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/

These sort of genomic study have some limilation. It is hard to precisely define sources of mixing when it occurred between genetically similar groups, and scenarios involving multiple waves of mixing over time or between multiple groups can be difficult to tease apart. But it is believed that larger sample sizes will improve resolution. These high resolution will provide a deeper understanding of human history.

Reference:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/01/28/science.1245938

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21390129?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg

http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-ethnicity.html

Image: Wikipedia

Address of the bookmark: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/25/22/3005/179064

Candidate Requirements: A PhD in computer science, computational biology, Bioinformatics, or a related field, along with sufficient programming skills for prototyping. Experience with next generation sequencing data analysis is required. Candidates with MS degree but with relevant work experience can also be considered. The successful candidate must be motivated and capable of working independently as well as in team environment.

Eligible and interested candidates can email your resumes to rohit at strandls dot com

About Strand Life Sciences: Strand was founded in 2000 by computer science and mathematics professors who recognized the need to automate and integrate life science data analysis through an algorithmic and computational approach. Strand’s solutions for life sciences research are robust and easy to use by the most novice user while powerful and configurable for the bioinformatician. Using its award-winning application development platform, AVADIS®, Strand builds innovative products that enable fast and cutting-edge analysis for basic and clinical research, drug discovery and development.

http://www.avadis-ngs.com/careers

Address of the bookmark: http://scikit-bio.org/

Current computational interests:

Systematic analysis of genetic epistasis to identify redundant or compensatory systems and to reveal order of action in genetic pathways.
Using knockout, knockdown, or overexpression, or other perturbation experiments in combinations of genes in S. cerevisiae, C. elegans or mouse.
Using genome-scale genotyping of natural polymorphisms in S. cerevisiae and human populations.
Alternative splicing and its relationship to protein interaction networks.
Integrating large-scale studies including phenotype, genetic epistasis, protein-protein and transcription-regulatory interactions and sequence patterns to quantitatively assign function to genes and guide experimentation.

More at http://llama.mshri.on.ca/index.html

In this tutorial series article, I will explore features and packages of python which are widely used in the big data, NGS, and bioinformatics. I will also walk through a real biological example which shows NGS data processing with the help of python packages and programming.

Python has a couple of points to recommend it to biologists and scientists specifically:

• It's widely used in the scientific community
• It has a couple of very well designed libraries for doing complex scientific computing (although we won't encounter them in this book)
• It lend itself well to being integrated with other, existing tools
• It has features which make it easy to manipulate strings of characters (for example, strings of DNA bases and protein amino acid residues, which we as biologists are particularly fond of)

In general, following are some of the important features of python which makes it a perfect fit for rapid application development.

• Python is interpreted language so the program does not need to be compiled. Interpreter parses the program code and generates the output.
• Python is dynamically typed, so the variables types are defined automatically.
• Python is strongly typed. So the developers need to cast the type manually.
• Less code and more use makes it more acceptable.
• Python is portable, extendable and scalable.

There are two major Python versions, Python 2 and Python 3. Python 2 and 3 are quite different. This tutorial uses Python 3, because it more semantically correct and supports newer features.

I will post tutorial on daily basis on this page. Check the sub-pages on right side.

1) Statistical machine learning methods for the analysis of medical
epigenomics data.

2) Sequence analysis algorithms for detection of RNA-DNA interactions.

Applicants should hold a M.Sc . or PhD in Computer Science or related
areas. Experience in the analysis of biological sequences, gene
expression and gene regulation is desirable. The candidate should have
solid programming skills (C, Python and/or R) and acquaintance with
Linux. Experience with high performance computing is a plus. The
working language of the group is English.

The position is based on the German TV-L 13 salary scale, including
all German social benefits (health insurance and pension scheme). The
expected starting date is September 2014. Interested candidates should
send a CV, statement of research interests and the names of three
references to jobs@costalab.org.

More at http://costalab.org/wp/phd-and-postdoc-position-in-computational-biology/