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发帖数: 773 | 1 Brief Introduction of Biofuels Lab at Virginia Tech
“Imagination, Invention, innovation --- Replacing Crude Oil by Sugars
through Cascade Enzyme Factories”. Website: http://sugarcar.com
The mission of the Biofuels Laboratory led by associate professor Yi-Heng
Percival Zhang at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (USA)
is to solve key sustainability challenges – What will replace crude oil?
How and when? How to feed the world in future? Dr. Zhang is a world
recognized young biochemical engineer for his pioneering work in in vitro
synthetic biology and biofuels production. His previous inventions have
been licensed to three biofuels companies – Mascoma (USA), BioMethodes/
Optafuel (French/USA), and Gate Fuels (USA). For example, he is the first
to generate useful chemical energy from useless low-temperature waste heat
and to break natural Thauer limit of microbial hydrogen fermentation. He
proposes the use of sugars replacing crude oil in the transport section
through cell-free synthetic enzymatic pathway biotransformation (SyPaB). To
transform his laboratory inventions to integration innovations, two postdoc
positions in enzyme engineering are available. This project is funded by a
top-three oil company.
Position description and responsibilities
The Biofuels Laboratory is hiring two talented, motivated, and dedicated
postdocs. The research topic of postdocs is to address the last remaining
obstacle to SyPaB – engineering redox enzymes’ cofactor preference from
natural cofactors (NAD or NADP) to low-cost stable biomimetic cofactors as
suggested in ACS Catalysis 2011, 1: 998 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cs200218f . The breakthrough in engineered redox enzymes would result in numerous great applications from ultra-high energy density sugar batteries to sugar fuel vehicles to CO2 fixation.
As a postdoc, you will engineer some redox enzymes and change their cofactor
preferences from natural to biomimetic ones. You will build homology
protein structure models, do site-directed mutation at key amino acid sites,
construct protein mutant library by random mutation, isolated and
characterize desired mutants. Postdocs should have good communication
skills and report research progress clearly, frequently, and effectively.
Salary, fringe benefits, and retirement package will be commensurate with
experience and qualifications.
Requirements:
Ph.D. degree in enzyme biochemistry, biochemical or biomolecular engineering
or applied microbiology,
Research experience in enzyme engineering by rational design, computational
protein design and/or directed evolution,
Clone, express, purify recombinant proteins in E. coli and characterize
enzymes’ properties,
Discover, isolate, screen and characterize new thermoenzymes from
extremophilies,
Previous research experience in proteins’ cofactor engineering is preferred.
To Apply: Please send your application (cover letter including information
where you see this advertisement and resume) to y*****[email protected]. |
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