진학프로석·박사 채용 접수 플랫폼

Rector of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) invites applications for the position of an assistant professor funded through the research project of the European Research Council (ERC) titled “In with the good, out with the bad: understanding small molecule influx and efflux in gut” (IN and OUT)

The human gut microbiome has a profound influence on many aspects of human health. The Bacteroides genus belongs to the Gram-negative Bacteroidetes phylum and is the most abundant genus in the guts of western world populations. Bacteroides have received much attention due to their ability to utilise dietary glycans that are inaccessible to the host ("fibre"). However, the ability to degrade fibre is unlikely to explain the dominance of Bacteroides, given the fibre-poor diets in western societies. Since microbial and epithelial cell turnover in the human gut is very high, there are many diet-independent nutrient sources within the gut, and we hypothesise that Bacteroides have evolved to efficiently utilise those. In addition, noxious compounds such as bile acids and antibiotics need to be removed from the cell. All these processes depend critically on lipoproteins, channels and transporters residing in the bacterial outer membrane (OM). 

The EU-funded project "IN and OUT" aims to identify novel OM influx and efflux processes in gut Bacteroides via a multi-disciplinary approach to understand why this genus is so abundant. Compared to Proteobacteria like E. coli in which these processes have been studied in detail, OM influx and efflux in the phylogenetically distant Bacteroides is largely terra incognita. The first strand within the project (INFLUX) focuses on acquisition of abundant nutrients within the gut, such as proteins, peptidoglycan, nucleic acids and lipids. The second strand (EFFLUX) is dedicated to studying efflux pumps, which play important roles in removing toxic molecules like antibiotics and human drugs from the cell. In both projects you will discover novel biology that will contribute to our understanding why the genus Bacteroides is so abundant in the human gut.