Sano Postdoc - NCN Weave

Location Krakow

Region / State / Province małopolskie

About job:

Sano Postdoc

Project title: Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioinformatics – NCN Weave

Publication date: 18.06.2025

Closing date: 14.08.2025

Announcement date for the result of the competition: 22.09.2025

Level of education: PhD with no more than 7 years of postdoctoral experience (in case of candidates who previously were on a maternity leave, this period is prolonged by 18 months per child)

Hours: 40 hours per week

Salary indication: up to 140 000 PLN of employer’s costs per annum

Supervisor:

Sano: Dr. Tomasz Kościółek

Project period: until Dec 2027

The position is funded from NCN Weave grant.

Thanks to over a decade of metagenomics efforts, we have a catalogue of over 170 million unique putative proteins from the human gut microbiome. About 40% of these do not have function assigned (dark proteins), hence limiting our understanding of the well-established relationship between the gut microbiome and human health. Following up on these developments, our objective is to construct an integrative view of putative molecular functions and biological roles of proteins from the human gut microbiome by combining deep learning-driven, structure-based function prediction with a large-scale view of the protein universe.

Our large-scale and integrative approach to map and interpret all human gut microbiome proteins, especially those that are difficult to annotate and are thus functionally dark, will lay the groundwork for efficient metagenomic-scale use of this source of biological information. It will provide life scientists a better understanding of gut microbiota metabolic phenotypes, helping to prioritize relevant proteins for experimental characterization and therapeutic exploration.

What are you going to do?

You are expected to:

do original research under the direction of one of the Research Group Leaders;

publish your work in peer-review journals and present during national and international conferences;

co-mentor junior scientists – PhD students and MSc students;

work on representative human gut microbiome protein structures atlas;

work on creating the database of human gut microbial proteins;

work on molecular mimicry and on protein family-function relationships;

work on genomic contexts of dark metagenomic proteins;

work on human gut microbial protein function atlas from sequence, structure and contexts.

What do we require?

Required background and skills of the candidate:

recent or pending PhD (in computer science/bioinformatics or related field), no more than 7 years of postdoctoral experience (between obtaining the PhD and the application for the job, in case of candidates who previously were on a maternity leave, this period is prolonged by 18 months per child);

experience in structural bioinformatics;

experience in programming (esp. Python);

documented experience in bioinformatics research;

experience in protein structure prediction;

interest in protein-protein interaction predictions;

interest in metagenomics and microbiome research.

Our offer:

We offer a fixed-term contract for 40 hours per week. This will be supported by an educational plan that includes attendance of courses and (international) meetings. The contract will include opportunities to participate in teaching and supervision of undergraduate and master students.

The salary, depending on relevant experience before the beginning of the employment contract, will be up to 140 000 PLN of employer's costs, based on a full-time contract (40 hours a week) with private medical care and a sports card.

Sano offers excellent opportunities for study and development, an access to many international conferences on computational medicine and a possibility to grow in a scientific society.