The Spang Team within the Department of Marine Microbiology and Biogeochemistry (MMB) located at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), is looking for a postdoctoral researcher with a background in cultivation of halophilic organisms, microscopy, transcriptomics, microbial genomics or related fields with an interest in symbiosis and archaea. The position is offered for 21 months.
ROYAL NIOZ
NWO-NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research is the Dutch national oceanographic institute and principally performs academically excellent multidisciplinary, fundamental, and frontier applied marine research addressing important scientific and societal questions pertinent to the functioning of the ocean and seas. NIOZ includes the National Marine research Facilities (NMF) department that operates a fleet of research vessels and the national pool of large seagoing equipment, and supports excellence in multidisciplinary marine research, education, and policy development.
THE DEPARTMENT
The research of the Department of Marine Microbiology and Biogeochemistry (MMB) has a long history of studying Archaea, and other marine microbes, their interactions, and their role in biogeochemical cycling in a variety of marine environments, varying from tidal flats and coral reefs to the deep ocean and sediments. The department is equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories, bioinformatics resources and analytical equipment, and has an excellent level of technical support.
THE PROJECT
The research team of Anja Spang has a key interest in the role of symbiosis in the evolution of life on Earth ranging from the origin of the eukaryotic cell to symbiotic relationships between different extant microbial groups, such as syntrophic and symbiotic interactions involving archaeal partners. A focus of her research lies in the study of DPANN archaea, which comprises organisms with extremely small genomes and cell sizes, that includes the so far only parasitic members of the archaea.
In this project, we are using cultivation, microscopy, molecular biology and transcriptomics approaches to identify hosts of uncultivated DPANN symbionts, enrich and characterise previously uncultivated DPANN representatives and elucidate symbiont-host interactions between Candidatus
Nanohaloarchaeum antarcticus and Halorubrum lacusprofundi host to expand our knowledge of the diversity of DPANN archaea-host systems and gain insights into the functional role of DPANN symbionts and their potential impact on host ecology.
