PhD Position at University of Primorska, Slovenia with our WG4 vice leader Elena Bužan (elena.buzan@famnit.upr.si)

We would like to inform you that there is an open PhD positions at University of Primorska in Bioinformatics, so if you know some potential candidates, please forward the information to them.

This is a 4-year fully funded position (officially called young researcher position), which includes monthly net salary starting at 1050 Eur (this is an average salary in Slovenia), and additional funds for traveling and lab consumables. The PhD programme is in english, no need to know Slovenian.

Potentially interested candidates can write to: elena.buzan@famnit.upr.si

Short description of the research topic:

The PhD candidate's work will focus, using an interdisciplinary approach, on the understanding of ecosystem functioning, species evolutionary processes and how conservation actions should integrate this knowledge for long term planning. Specifically, in the course of his/her training, young researcher will investigate the evolutionary implications of hybridization, from the introgression of important phenotypic traits between species, to the creation of new species through hybrid speciation and adaptation to different environmental conditions. Young researcher will develop the bioinformatic tools to analyse, identify and categorise hybrids, their level of introgression, and the frequency of introgression in different populations/ecosystems. The work will also address the time of the hybridization event – recent vs. ancient – to understand the behaviour of introgressed loci in their new genomic background, their influence on survival, adaptation and expansion potential of the species. Young researcher will perform (meta-)analysis of the genetic introgression effects and genotypic diversity across individuals, populations and ecosystem levels of wild plant/animal and their domestic relatives or between lines of interest in order to: i) detect signatures of selection on introgressed genes, ii) investigate links between introgression and phenotypic variation and fitness.

Example of bioinformatic analysis: (1)Requirements: sequencing data from several genomes; (2) Iterative mapping approach using tools like: BWA, Samtools, GATK, etc. (3) identification of regions that were affected by introgression: the ancestry inference method implemented in Efficient Local Ancestry Inference (4) determination of the period of introgression; methods, based on the size distribution of DNA tracts identical by state within and between species, testing models with multiple introgression pulses, simulations of demographic expansion and introgression: SPLATCHE2; (5) Identify genome segments with extensive nuclear DNA introgression with Relative Node Depth and functional annotation of introgressed genes; (6) development of bioinformatics pipeline in Python; (7) implementation and application of pattern matching algorithms in bioinformatics.

The details about the open call can be found on the link below (click on Elena Buzan, to get more infos).

Deadline for application is July 8th.

https://www.upr.si/en/university/open-calls--tenders/research-open-calls/