[IIGB_All] Postdoctoral Position in Metabolic Evolution and Engineering

[IIGBadmin]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I would be grateful for your assistance in identifying outstanding postdoctoral candidates for my laboratory. Our research focuses on evolution of specialized metabolic pathways that protect plants from environmental damage. The position offers training in state of the art metabolomics, functional genomics and structural biology research in a highly collaborative laboratory and campus environment.
Areas of current and future interest include:
-        Identification of evolutionary mechanisms contributing to metabolic diversity in trichomes and roots of plants across the Solanaceae.
-        Use of gene editing technologies to study the roles of acylsugars in plant-insect and plant-microbe interactions.
-        Leveraging BAHD acyltransferase diversity for protein structure-function analysis and engineering of medically important compounds.
We are located in a dynamic plant research environment on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI USA. We benefit enormously from collaborations with computational biologists, structural biologists, analytical chemists and metabolic biochemists.
Recent publications include:

  1.  Moghe, G.D., B.J. Leong, S. Hurney, A.D. Jones and R.L. Last. 2017. Evolutionary routes to biochemical innovation revealed by integrative analysis of a plant defense related specialized metabolic pathway. eLife 2017;6:e28468 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.28468
  2.  Fan, P., A.M. Miller, X. Liu, A.D. Jones and R.L. Last. 2017. Evolution of a flipped pathway creates metabolic innovation in tomato trichomes through BAHD enzyme promiscuity. Nat. Comm. 8, Article number: 2080. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02045-7
  3.  Leong, B.J., D. Lybrand, Y.-R. Lou, P. Fan, A.L. Schilmiller, R.L. Last. 2019. Evolution of metabolic novelty: a trichome-expressed invertase creates specialized metabolic diversity in wild tomato. Sci. Advances 5 (4), eaaw3754 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/4/eaaw3754
  4.  Leong, B.J., S.M. Hurney, P.D. Fiesel, G.D. Moghe, A.D. Jones and R.L. Last. 2020. Specialized metabolism in a non-model nightshade: trichome acylinositol biosynthesis. Plant Physiol. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.20.00276

  1.  Fan, P., P. Wang, Y.-R. Lou, B.J. Leong, B.J. Moore, C.A. Schenck, R. Combs, P. Cao, F. Brandizzi, S.-H. Shiu and R.L. Last. 2020. Evolution of a plant gene cluster in Solanaceae and emergence of metabolic diversity. eLife 2020;9:e56717. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56717

Interested candidates should send a statement of research interest, CV and contact information for three referees familiar with you and your accomplishments to roblast1 at gmail.com<mailto:roblast1 at gmail.com>. Please also apply at  https://careers.msu.edu/cw/en-us/job/503724/research-associatefixed-term.
Sincerely,
Rob Last
Barnett Rosenberg Professor of Plant Biochemistry



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