Postdoc on Computational (Meta)Genomic Analysis
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- Wageningen University and Research Centre via AcademicTransfer - Posted on: 5 August 2026 Postdoc on computational (meta)genomic analysis
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Wageningen University & Research
- Agricultural sciences » Agronomics
- Agricultural sciences » Phytotechny
- Biological sciences » Biodiversity
- Biological sciences » Botany
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Recognised Researcher (R2)
Type of Contract
Hours Per Week
Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?
Not funded by a EU programme
Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges for global food security, requiring new approaches to understand and harness the natural diversity that enables plants and their associated microbiomes to adapt to environmental change. Ancient environmental DNA (eDNA) provides a unique record of past ecosystems, preserving genetic traces of microorganisms and plants that interacted with crops and their wild relatives over thousands of years. In this project, you will develop and apply computational omics approaches to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying ancient plant-microbiome interactions, with a particular focus on biosynthetic gene clusters and other functional genes involved in chemical communication, defence, and adaptation. You will analyse large-scale ancient metagenomic datasets to identify and characterize microbial and plant-derived biosynthetic pathways, predict their ecological functions, and reconstruct the (co-)evolutionary dynamics of traits such as microbiome recruitment, metabolite-mediated interactions, pathogenicity and disease resistance. This will involve using and further adapting state-of-the-art genome mining approaches, including biosynthetic gene cluster identification, gene cluster family classification, and functional prediction, to work with highly fragmented and complex eDNA datasets.
This proj...