Christen Lab: Master Thesis Project in Experimental Systems Biology

Background: Our research group at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology strives to develop, apply and teach the interdisciplinary research at the forefront of experimental systems biology. We employ hyper-saturated transposon mutagenesis coupled to high-throughput DNA sequencing to investigate cellular core networks in microbes. Our mission is to identify and characterize essential genome features and to interrogate how their functions are programmed into genomes.

Project: Despite the haploid nature of bacterial genomes, many genes for cellular core components and biochemical functions are redundantly encoded. Mutations within redundant genes will often show no phenotypic consequences. The main source of genetic redundancy is the process of gene duplication that generates a multiplicity in gene copy number.  A second source of genetic redundancy resides in convergent evolutionary processes leading to genes that are close in function but unrelated in sequence. During this exciting master project you will experimentally map redundant core genes across the entire genome of the cell cycle organism Caulobacter crescentus. You will generate large-scale targeted deletions of genome segments and apply transposon sequencing to discover genome-wide the level of genetic redundancy. This Master project offers the unique opportunity to acquire a sound knowledge in genome minimization approaches and cutting-edge systems biology.

Skills: Interest in experimental systems-genetics, high-throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics

Start: position immediately available

Duration: 6 months - open to extension

Supervision and more information: Beat Christen and Matthias Christen