SRUC is unique in Scotland and one of the largest organisations of its kind in Europe. Our ambitious and exciting vision is to work at local, national and international levels, leading innovation and sustainable development in agriculture and rural sectors.

We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced computational biologist/ bioinformatician to take the lead in the analysis of microbiome data from soil & crop plant systems significant to the UK Agritech sector.

This work is part of a 5-year BBR BBSRC funded grant The UK Crop Microbiome CryoBank. This project will establish a microbiome resource comprising (a) an integrated cryopreserved collection of samples (rhizoplane soil, bacterial and fungal isolates, plant material and DNA) and (ii) a resource of associated -omic data and analyses.

Your role will be to use computational tools to analyse large-scale metagenomics datasets (amplicon and metagenomes). You will create analyses workflows to achieve, data quality control, taxonomic classification and phylogenetic analysis in the first instance. The project will additionally involve data integration of multi-omics data for functional interpretations. The project will comprise both methodological and applied aspects. The project will generate metagenomic data from more 300 samples and hence you will be dealing with truly big biological data. This position is ideal for someone wanting to grow their bioinformatics experience and there will be opportunities for training in specific aspects.

Essential

• A PhD degree in Biology, Biochemistry, Bioinformatics or a related field
• Proven biological background knowledge and bioinformatics skills related to next generation sequence analysis
• Experience in data analysis, integration, statistical analysis and visualisation
• Ability to work both independently and in a team
• Willingness to learn new skills as project requires
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and English language skills

Desirable

• Experience in working with the Linux command line and compute clusters
• Familiarity with sequencing, processing and analysing large metagenomic/ microbiome datasets (using software such as QUIIME)
• Knowledge of database design and integration
• Ability to programme in at least one language (e.g. Python)
• Experience with data analysis software (e.g. R, Pandas)
• Experience with version control of code (e.g. GitHub)

This is a full time fixed-term contract for 30 months.

Further details on the requirements of this role can be found in the Job Particulars document which you must read before applying for this role. This is downloadable when you click the APPLY link.