SteinBlog

Postdoc Position in Cheminformatics and Computational Metabolomics

A postdoc position is available in my research group at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany.

Open Positions:

Postdoc: We are looking for a talented cheminformatician, bioinformatician or someone with comparable skills to work on the development cloud-based methods for computational metabolomics. The successful candidate will work closely with the H2020 e-infrastructure project PhenoMeNal, a European consortium of 14 partners. This position requires excellent skills in at least one modern, object-oriented programming language. A strong interest in metabolomics and cloud computing as well as the ability to work in a distributed team will be advantageous. The postdoc will also have the opportunity to participate in the day-to-day management of the group as well as in the organisation of seminars and practical courses for our students

The position requires a strong interest in metabolomics, molecular informatics and current IT technologies, programming skills a modern object oriented programming language and the ability to work in geographically distributed teams.

Please send applications in PDF format by email to christoph.steinbeck@uni-jena.de. We will accept applications until the position is filled.

Background information:

The Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU Jena), founded in 1558, is one of the oldest universities in Europe and a member in the COIMBRA group, a network of prestigious, traditional European universities. The University of Jena has a distinguished record of innovations and resulting educational strengths in  major fields such as optics, photonics and optical technologies, innovative materials and related technologies, dynamics of complex biological systems and humans in changing social environments. It has more than 18,000 students. The university’s friendly and stimulating atmosphere and state-of-the-art facilities boost academic careers and enable excellence in learning, teaching and research. Assistance with proposing and inaugurating new research projects and with establishing public-private partnerships is considered a crucial point.

About Christoph Steinbeck

 


Compliance with minimum information guidelines in public metabolomics repositories

Rachel Spicer in my group in Cambridge has published an article in Nature Scientific Data on the compliance with minimum information guidelines in public metabolomics repositories. 

The abstract:

The Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI) guidelines were first published in 2007. These guidelines provided reporting standards for all stages of metabolomics analysis: experimental design, biological context, chemical analysis and data processing. Since 2012, a series of public metabolomics databases and repositories, which accept the deposition of metabolomic datasets, have arisen. In this study, the compliance of 399 public data sets, from four major metabolomics data repositories, to the biological context MSI reporting standards was evaluated. None of the reporting standards were complied with in every publicly available study, although adherence rates varied greatly, from 0 to 97%. The plant minimum reporting standards were the most complied with and the microbial and in vitro were the least. Our results indicate the need for reassessment and revision of the existing MSI reporting standards. Putty ISO download


Opinion Piece on the Future of Metabolomics in ELIXIR

Leading metabolomics researchers across Europe have co-authored an opinion piece in F1000 Research about “The Future of Metabolomics in ELIXIR”.

ABSTRACT:

Metabolomics, the youngest of the major omics technologies, is supported by an active community of researchers and infrastructure developers across Europe. To coordinate and focus efforts around infrastructure building for metabolomics within Europe, a workshop on the “Future of metabolomics in ELIXIR” was organised at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. This one-day strategic workshop involved representatives of ELIXIR Nodes, members of the PhenoMeNal consortium developing an e-infrastructure that supports workflow-based metabolomics analysis pipelines, and experts from the international metabolomics community. The workshop established metabolite identification as the critical area, where a maximal impact of computational metabolomics and data management on other fields could be achieved. In particular, the existing four ELIXIR Use Cases, where the metabolomics community – both industry and academia – would benefit most, and which could be exhaustively mapped onto the current five ELIXIR Platforms were discussed. This opinion article is a call for support for a new ELIXIR metabolomics Use Case, which aligns with and complements the existing and planned ELIXIR Platforms and Use Cases.


Article: Automatic Assembly of Species Metabolomes

Together with our collaborator Mark Viant in Birmingham, Robert Hall in Wageningen and Laura Reed at the University of Alabama, the MetaboLights team has just published an article where we argue that the mandatory inclusion of discovered lists of metabolites in submissions to the MetaboLights database leads to the automatic or better crowd-sourced assembly of species metabolomes.

[tpsingle key=”Salek:2017ex” link=true]
[tpabstract key=”Salek:2017ex”]


Next EMBO Course for Computational Metabolomics

We have been co-organising the EMBO Course for Computational Metabolomics in Cambridge for the last four years. The next course has now been announced and is open for applications.

The course is usually heavily oversubscribed, but it is worth applying. One week of great fun with excellent teachers and students.

Date: Monday 5 - Friday 9 February 2018

Venue: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) - Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge,  CB10 1SD, United Kingdom

Application opens:  Friday August 04 2017

Application deadline:  Friday November 03 2017

Participation:  Open application with selection

Contact: Emily Rees

Registration fee:  £350 including accommodation & food


Postdoc and phd positions

Postdoc position and phd positions are available in our group at Jena University, Germany.

The successful candidates will work in an exciting network of local and international collaborations, such as the PhenoMeNal project funded by the European Commission in their Horizon2020 framework program.

Open Positions:

  1. Postdoc: We are looking for a talented cheminformatician, bioinformatician or someone with comparable skills to work on the development cloud-based methods for computational metabolomics. The successful candidate will work closely with the H2020 e-infrastructure project PhenoMeNal, a European consortium of 14 partners. This position requires excellent skills in at least one modern, object-oriented programming language. A strong interest in metabolomics and cloud computing as well as the ability to work in a distributed team will be advantageous. The postdoc will also have the opportunity to participate in the day-to-day management of the group as well as in the organisation of seminars and practical courses for our students.
  2. PhD student, biomedical information mining: In this phd project the candidate will combine methods of text mining, image mining and cheminformatics to extract information about metabolites and natural products from the published primary literature. This includes opportunities to work with the OpenMinTed consortium, where we have been leading the biomedical use case in the last 1.5 years, as well as with the ContentMine team.
  3. PhD student, cheminformatic prediction of natural product structures: Depending on skills and interests of the successful candidate, this project can target the problem of structure prediction of natural products and metabolite from either the side of spectroscopic information which one might have about an unknown natural product or starting from the genome of a natural product producing organism. Two positions are available in this area.

All PhD positions require a strong interest in molecular informatics and current IT technologies, programming skills a modern object oriented programming language and the ability to work in geographically distributed teams.

Please send applications in PDF format by email to christoph.steinbeck@uni-jena.de. We will accept applications until the position is filled.

Background information:

The Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU Jena), founded in 1558, is one of the oldest universities in Europe and a member in the COIMBRA group, a network of prestigious, traditional European universities. The University of Jena has a distinguished record of innovations and resulting educational strengths in  major fields such as optics, photonics and optical technologies, innovative materials and related technologies, dynamics of complex biological systems and humans in changing social environments. It has more than 18,000 students. The university’s friendly and stimulating atmosphere and state-of-the-art facilities boost academic careers and enable excellence in learning, teaching and research. Assistance with proposing and inaugurating new research projects and with establishing public-private partnerships is considered a crucial point.

About Christoph Steinbeck