Postdoc position at the MPI and CGC : Germany

Introduction

A post-doctoral fellow position is immediately available at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology and Chemical Genomics Center of the Max Planck Society, Germany. The project is funded by European Research Council (ERC). One of the main interests of the group is a system that has been evaluated at the molecular and cellular level with a range of chemical, molecular and cell biological techniques concerns mechanism of autophagy. Some projects are in close collaboration with pharmaceutical companies.

Max-Planck Society is a world-leading research institution. MPS features in the top place of world institutions in the ranking of citation rates and gross influence. The lab located in the technology park of Dortmund provides an international and dynamic research environment. Facilities include a center for automated cloning and protein expression, and advanced microscopes (confocal, FLIM, TIRF, EM).

Project description

Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved self-eating process mainly to eliminate or recycle dysfunctional cellular organelles or unused proteins. Autophagy plays an important role in physiology including development and ageing and has been associated with diverse human diseases, including cancer, neurodegeneration, cardiac hypertrophy, and pathogen infection (1). Autophagy modulation is implicated in the treatment of diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer (2). Despite extensive work, the models of autophagosome formation and autophagy regulation are not yet well established.

Of importance for the understanding of these processes is the ability to manipulate gene function in a rapid manner, due to highly dynamic nature of autophagic processes. Although genetic approaches have been useful to identify genes involved in autophagy, they are chronic. Thereby the dynamics of phenotypic change cannot be followed using these approaches. We recently established chemical and chemo-optogenetic approaches that can perturb biological systems in an acute, conditional, reversible and tunable manner and feature excellent spatiotemporal control (3). Such features of these novel approaches enable to gain new insights into autophagy.