Jobs in Structural Biology and Related Fields

Bioinformatics Software Developer in Protein Structure and Genetic Variant Modelling

Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Application deadline: 09 Mar 2023

The Imperial London College are looking to recruit an experienced bioinformatics software developer to work on a Wellcome Trust funded project that develops and disseminates novel and easily-accessible resources for modelling protein structure and genetic variants.

There are two resources that will be developed and disseminated:

(i) The Missense3D portal that predicts the damaging effect of genetic variants by providing a 3D structure-based analysis. Missense3D is a popular resource for the genetic community with over 8,000 users in 2022 and >200 citations since its launch in 2019.

(ii) The Phyre portal that provides template-based prediction of protein structure from sequence. Work on Phyre will continue to develop complementary resources to the deep learning methods such as AlphaFold. Phyre is widely used by the community with over 50,000 unique users in 2022 and more than 7,000 citations to the 2015 paper.

The project will involve enhancing the underpinning algorithms and the dynamic web interfaces for both resources. The project will be supervised by Professor Michael Sternberg and Dr Alessia David at Imperial in collaboration with Professor Richard Houlston FRS at the Institute of Cancer Research (Sutton, London).

You will be a member of the team working in the Centre for Integrative and System Biology and Bioinformatics . The Centre also run a popular master’s course in Bioinformatics and Theoretical System Biology attended by about 20 students every year. You will have the opportunity to help in supervising master’s and undergraduate projects in bioinformatics related to your research.

Duties and responsibilities

You will develop and support the protein modelling resources Missense3D and Phyre working on both the algorithmic back end and the dynamic web site front end. In addition, you will help in disseminating and supporting the use of these resources. The major language for software development will be Python.

Essential and desirable requirements

• You will have an undergraduate degree in a biological, physical, numerical or computational discipline.
• You will have extensive experience of coding to a professional level in a high-level language such as Python, Java or a C and in particular experience of coding in Python.
• You will have experience of coding in the development of a dynamic web site using technologies such as Django, Tomcat, CSS and JavaScript.
• You will have experience of the Linux operating system.
• You will have a broad knowledge of Bioinformatics obtained via software development and/or a postgraduate degree in Bioinformatics or a very closely related discipline.
• In addition, it is desirable that you have (i) previously developed a bioinformatics resource, (ii) have had experience of working on computational studies on protein 3D structure and (iii) have developed algorithms using machine learning.
• A postgraduate degree in one of these disciplines or an equivalent qualification or experience would be desirable.

The post is full-time, fixed term for up to 36-months in the first instance with a working week of not normally less than 35 hours per week. You will be based at South Kensington Campus. You will be expected to start on 1 April 2023 or as soon as possible thereafter.

For informal enquiries please contact Professor Michael Sternberg m.sternberg@imperial.ac.uk