Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology • Tübingen • Germany

Help us change the face of genomics!

We are looking for motivated team players to join our group at the Max Planck Institute, one of the world’s most successful organizations in basic research. We are studying a range of biological questions, many revolving around plant and microbial genomes. The expertise of your future colleagues ranges from algorithm development and computational genomics to wet lab biology and field experiments, generating a highly interactive and interdisciplinary work environment. Many of our projects take advantage of the advanced in-house sequencing center providing direct and early-stage access to the latest long read technologies (Pacific Biosciences Sequel, Oxford Nanopore MinION) as well as more established Illumina short read platforms. We use these to assemble hundreds of genomes and complex genome mixtures, and genotype thousands of individuals. Of course, we use these technologies also for functional studies of, for example, epigenetic landscapes and gene expression profiles. Read more on our website at http://weigelworld.org.

Join us as a Computational Biologist

You think the era of draft genomes should come to an end? That populations can’t be represented with just a single reference genome? That functional data are as important as recording genetic variation?

Then join us to generate new golden standard resources for entire genera (Arabidopsis, Capsella), tackle complex genomes (grapevine, hops), or assemble metagenomes with the latest mix of sequencing technologies. Or integrate functional data to understand the green immune system or allele-specific expression patterns.

Join us as (Bio)informatician

You think graph-based methods are best for comparative genomics? That metagenome assemblers should deal effortlessly with uneven sequence coverage and both short and long reads?

Then join our development team, design your own (metagenome) long read assembler to facilitate the understanding of ecologically important microbial communities. Help us to produce methods that can deal with thousands of reference genomes and advance our comparative efforts with the latest graph-based approaches.

What’s our (and soon your) mission?

The long-term goal of our research is to understand both the molecular mechanisms and the evolution of adaptive traits. To this end, we are using both phenotype-first and genotype-first approaches to identify genetic variants with a potential role in local, regional or global adaptation. Additionally, we aim to develop tools and community resources, such as the 1001 Arabidopsis thaliana Genomes (http://1001genomes.org) project, that help other researchers world wide to answer important evolutionary questions.

Interested?

There are exciting opportunities to perform cutting-edge work in our department right now. So if you want to be part of our team as PhD student or Postdoc, send us a letter that outlines which research topics you are particularly interested in, and why your qualifications make you a good fit for us.

Detlef Weigel :weigel@tue.mpg.de
Director, MPI for Developmental Biology