Missions

The candidate will develop and lead a research project aimed at studying unicellular photosymbiosis, combining different approaches involving laboratory experiments (culture, photophysiology measurements) and imaging. The project, entitled '1+1=1: Bioengineering synthetic symbiosis to illuminate how a microalga becomes an endosymbiont', aims to reconstruct a synthetic symbiosis with different photosynthetic symbionts in order to understand how the interaction is established and identify the key mechanisms of symbiotic microalgae. This project, funded by the Human Frontier programme, will be carried out in collaboration with team members and project partners Daniel Ducat (Michigan State University, USA https://directory.natsci.msu.edu/Directory/Profiles/Person/100408) and Dietrich Kohlheyer (Research Centre Jülich, Germany: https://www.fz-juelich.de/profile/kohlheyer_d).
More information about the project can be found here: https://photosymbiosis.com/research/11-1-bioengineering-synthetic-symbiosis/

Activities

- Laboratory experiments with microalgae cultures under different conditions.
- Photophysiology measurements (photosynthesis, carbon fixation with 13C)
- Transmitted light microscopy and electron microscopy
- Meetings and visits with partner laboratories (Michigan State University, USA and Research Centre Jülich, Germany) .

Skills

We are looking for someone with skills and knowledge in cell culture, photophysiology, and multimodal imaging.
The skills we expect from our future colleague:
- Experience in microalgae physiology and imaging techniques.
- A PhD in a biological discipline (e.g. cell physiology, microbial ecology, genomics, plant biology).
- Knowledge and experience of research on microalgae/plants, as well as fluorescence microscopy, would be considered an asset.
- Excellent written and oral communication skills, as well as fluency in English, are required.
The candidate must have good interpersonal skills and the ability to work independently, but also to interact well within an international research group.

Work Context

The postdoctoral researcher will be employed by the CNRS and will be part of the Laboratory of Cellular and Plant Physiology (UMR 5168 - CNRS -CEA - Univ. Grenoble Alpes - INRAe) in Grenoble (France).
The team's projects aim to understand the functioning of unicellular photosymbiosis by combining subcellular imaging, photophysiology and molecular biology.
The researcher will be part of the Human Frontier project, which aims to reconstruct and manipulate a new photosymbiosis between a host and eukaryotic and prokaryotic microalgae. The project will be supervised by Johan Decelle and carried out in close collaboration with Daniel Ducat (Michigan State University, USA) and Dietrich Kohlheyer (Research Centre Jülich, Germany). For more information on the project, several publications are available on the Photosymbiosis team's website (https://photosymbiosis.com/publications/) and hereafter (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.22.572971v1).

Constraints and risks

no risks