PhD and Post-doc Projects in Proteomics and Bioinformatics

At Utrecht University in the group of Albert Heck there are several openings available for both talented PhD-students and post-doctoral researchers. We are seeking motivated people with experience in protein mass spectrometry, nanoLC, and proteomics. We regard a bioinformatics, biochemistry, cell biology and/or molecular biology background/interst as added value. PhD positions are for 4 years, postdocs for a minimum of two years. To give a flavor of our research interests, two projects are listed below.

Project I. Enabling Technologies to Investigate Phopsho-Tyrosine Signaling
Although mass spectrometry based proteomics may be close to enable the identification of every protein in the human proteome, current approaches are still far from being able to unravel the human proteome in its full glory. This would require a mixture of targeted approaches focusing at specific modifications or processing events at the time.
Many targeted approaches have been introduced to study protein post-tranlational modifications, for instance by enriching for, and selective analyses of, protein phosphorylation. Such methods enable the temporal charting of thousands of phosphorylation events in a human proteome. It is expected that at a single moment cells may contain more than 100,000 phosphorylation events. Tyrosine phosphorylation (pTyr) is thereby heavily underrepresented as it accounts for approximately only 0.1% of all phosphorylation events. Thus even more targeted methods are still indispensable to reveal pTyr signaling. Using pTyr antibodies the phosphotyrosine proteome can be selectively enriched. Using state-of-the-art mass spectrometry this will be used in this project to monitor temporal changes in thousands of pTyr events dynamically. These methods will be applied to study pTyr signaling in embryonic stem cell differentiation and in embryonic development.
Project supervisor: Prof. Dr. Albert J. R. Heck (a.j.r.heck@uu.nl)

Project II. Targeted Proteomic Analysis of Key Players in Cardiovascular Disease
Cardiovascular disease affects a large portion of the world population. Although the phenotypes of many different cardiovascular diseases are detailed, the underlying molecular mechanisms that trigger progression into a diseased state are only marginally understood. Proteomics is a new and promising tool to study these molecular effects of cardiovascular diseases. The rapid developments in mass spectrometry have enabled the identification of a large fraction of the proteome, while quantitative proteomics has enabled the large scale relative comparison of biological samples at the protein level. Within this project these state-of-the-art techniques will be combined to identify and characterize key factors in the onset of cardiovascular disease. Both in animal model systems, as in human patient material to eventually enable earlier intervention.
The onset of disease is likely caused by a malfunctioning in cell signaling pathways; therefore we will focus on this part of the proteome. Since these proteins are often low in abundance, the development of new sub-proteomic techniques (chemical proteomics) is important for success. Follow-up experiments involving proteins implicated in cardiovascular disease will be designed to probe their molecular environment using genetic tagging strategies in combination with quantitative proteomic techniques.
Project supervisor: Dr. Arjen Scholten (a.scholten@uu.nl)

Please send your resume along with a motivation and 2 references by email to Mrs Corine van Dijk (c.c.vandijk@uu.nl).