Synthetic and Systems Biology Scientist

The Biofoundry and the Synthetic and Systems Biology Team. Lesaffre has established the first industrial Biofoundry in France. This initiative brings together an international team of motivated, risk-taking scientists and engineers to merge biology, engineering, automation, and computer science. Their goal is to enhance microorganism engineering, screening, and selection for a wide range of industrial biotechnology applications, including baking, brewing, bioethanol, flavors and fragrances, food and feed, nutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals. Together with US-based Recombia teams and the France-based Microbial Engineering team, the Biofoundry is fueling a powerful Bioengineering ecosystem. The Synthetic and Systems Biology team (SSB) operates the Biofoundry together with the High-Throughput Screening and the Automation and Software Engineering teams. Its purpose is to design, build and learn from Lesaffre organisms, genes and genomes.

To accelerate the development of biosolutions for an increasing range of applications, it is crucial to continuously expand the scope, efficiency, and speed of our BUILD and NGS workflow portfolio. At the heart of our workflows is our ability to modify, amplify, assemble, and read DNA or RNA molecules in vitro, to extract them from microbial cells, and to deliver them into cells to modify their genomes.

We are seeking a highly motivated scientist with 1) cutting-edge expertise in DNA and genome engineering and molecular biology, and 2) a passion for bioengineering tools & technology development and optimization. The ideal candidate will develop or onboard high-potential tools and technologies to enhance the utility and power of our BUILD and NGS workflow portfolio.

Missions:

• Develop genome engineering tools and technologies to increase scope, efficiency and speed of our BUILD worfklows (onboard host organisms beyond S. cerevisiae and E. coli, increase efficiency of markerless DNA delivery to industrial strains, unlock multi-locus and multi-gene delivery…)
• Develop custom NGS tools and technologies inspired from state-of-the-art methods to increase the scope, efficiency and speed of our NGS workflows (custom indexing in library preparation for highly multiplexed DNA sequencing, onboard methods for marker-assisted breeding, onboard methods supporting our protein engineering activities…)
• Contribute to the continuous BUILD and NGS activity of the team during periods of high demands by executing established, highly automated workflows on robotic workcells (maximum 15% of the time) and provide feedback for continuous workflow improvement
• Nurture a close relationship with Recombia teams to foster collaboration with a focus on genome engineering technologies and associated NGS technology
• Maintain state-of-the-art knowledge in the area of microbial synthetic and systems biology as well as multiplex custom NGS methods by critically reading papers and participating in relevant conferences. Identify key technologies with the potential to unlock existing bottlenecks in the development of high-performance engineered strains

This role involves spending time in the lab (around 50%). Data analysis can be performed in tandem with the Computational Biology & AI team, but autonomy in basic data analysis using Python or similar is required.

Requirements

• PhD in a microbiology / synthetic biology / systems biology / molecular biology
• Experience in custom NGS methods and microbial genome engineering
• Ability to analyse your own data with custom scripts
• Fluency in English
• LIMS experience (Benchling or others) is a plus