The Single Cell and Synthetic Genomics of Blood Formation lab, led by Lars Velten at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona is seeking a PhD student with a high degree of motivation, computational training, and bioinformatic experience to take a lead role in clonal dynamics research into blood formation during ageing and hematological diseases.
Project Information
Blood formation is an essential, biomedically highly relevant, and complex process of cellular differentiation. Their group studies adult hematopoiesis by combining computational biology, single-cell genomics, and genetic screens. One important thing to realize is that humans have a pretty small number of blood stem cells—on the order of 100,000 cells. Most of these cells, at any point in time, are deeply quiescent, and an even smaller number of clones is making blood. This has bearing because, for example, different stem cell clones are epigenetically and functionally different. Some clones make more T-cells; other clones are better adapted to inflammation. Ageing of blood is inevitably associated with a decline in clonal complexity and deterioration of clonal function. Single-cell methods capturing both “what a cell can do” and its clonal identity are lacking for the study of these processes. We have recently developed such a method, EPI-Clone, which captures clonal, functional, and molecular information by reading out the DNA methylome at single-cell resolution for 10,000s of cells.
Qualifications and Requirements
- You have M.Sc. degree in a relevant field, such as computational biology, genomics, biomedicine or bioinformatics
- You have a strong interest in single-cell genomics technology and stem cell biology
- You have research experience in computational biology (at least 6 months of research work on a single project)
- You had excellent grades in quantitative disciplines throughout your studies
- You are an expert in programming with either R or Python.
- Proficiency in English.
- You have been trained not only in computational research but also in experimental work: cloning, library preparation, qPCR, etc.
- Basic Machine Learning and statistics
Deadline and Application
The deadline for the application is on 25 September 2024. For more details and application, visit the official website.
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