James Martin Fellowship

This position is now closed. A prestigious James Martin Fellowship funded by the Oxford Martin School is available in my research group for a highly motivated and creative population geneticist interested in developing cutting edge methods for the analysis of high-throughput whole genome sequencing data to better understand the evolution and epidemiology of the major pathogens HIV and Hepatitis C Virus.

The position, which is part of the Curing Chronic Viral Infections project, is fully funded for three years and is affiliated with the Institute for Emerging Infections, the Modernising Medical Microbiology consortium, the Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research and the Nuffield Department of Medicine. The ideal candidate will have a track record in statistical or computational genetics and experience of programming in a language such as C++ or Java.

Full details can be found on the University of Oxford Recruitment website. Please send informal enquiries, with a CV, to me by email. The deadline for applications is 12 noon on 27th November 2012.

Post-doc Positions in Pathogen Genomics

Post-doc positions in Pathogen Genomics are available in my group and Derrick Crook's lab. We will be hiring people to work on pathogen whole genome sequence analysis and bioinformatics. More details available soon. In the meantime, find out about our research:

• Nuffield Department of Medicine: Dr Daniel Wilson
• Nuffield Department of Medicine: Prof Derrick Crook
• Oxford Martin School: Health and Medicine
• Modernising Medical Microbiology
• Oxford Biomedical Research Centre: Infection Theme

If you are interested, please get in touch.

Science Bomb!

On Friday Chris Spencer gave the PPS (Pritchard/Przeworski/Stephens) lab meeting as part of a trip to Chicago. Chris talked about his work in Oxford on association studies in a number of common genetic diseases being studied by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium.

Beforehand I dropped the Science Bomb, a new innovation this year (for which I think Barbara Engelhardt is responsible) where someone talks about a particularly interesting or timely article. Dan Gaffney pointed me in the direction of a PLoS Biology paper titled Reawakening Retrocyclins: Ancestral Human Defensins Active Against HIV-1.

The subject of the study is a human pseudogene known as retrocyclin, which has been shown to confer resistance to HIV-1 infection in human cell lines. The pseudogene is expressed naturally in several human tissues, but not translated into protein owing to a premature stop codon. The paper's authors reawakened retrocyclin using aminoglycosides, a class of antibiotics that cause (as a side effect) a degree of mis-translation and hence allow "read-through" of the stop codon. You can see the slides from my Science Bomb here.