INRAE is a public establishment with over 10,000 employees throughout France. As Europe's leading agronomic research institute, INRAE conducts research aimed at improving food quality and preserving the environment.
 

The laboratory

You will be working in the Genomics-Info Resources Unit (URGI) at the INRAE Versailles site (https://urgi.versailles.inrae.fr/). This bioinformatics laboratory, which employs around twenty people, is made up of two teams. The ‘Information systems and data integration’ team works on the integration of genetic and genomic data. The other team, ‘Genome Analysis’, is interested in the evolution of genomes in relation to transposable elements.
 

The host team

You will belong to the ‘Genome Analysis’ team which consists of 1 Research Director, 1 Research Engineer, 2 Design Engineers. This team is internationally recognised for its expertise in genome analysis. It was involved in a large number of genome annotation projects where it carries out structural and functional annotations. It studies the structure, function and evolution of genomes. In particular, it is developing a software suite called REPET, which is used in many international sequencing projects to annotate transposable elements.

Your activities

The project you will join aims to understand to what extent transposable elements (TEs) contribute to the evolution of regulatory pathways in plants. This project will be led by Johann Confais and Hadi Quesneville, with complementary expertise on evolution, molecular genetics and genomics from Clémentine Vitte and Leandro Quadrana.
You will be in charge of the TE annotation using innovative new methods to identify young, ancient, and even the so-called “dark-matter”, i.e. very ancient TE-derived sequences. With these annotations you will study Cis Regulatory Elements (CRE) in TEs and decipher the contribution of recent and ancient TEs to developmental and stress-induced functions across plant evolution.

Your profile

We seek a candidate who possesses the following:
- PhD in Genomics and Bioinformatics, with strong foundation in plant genomics
- Strong background in genome analysis required, particularly in Transposable Element analysis

How to apply

The position starts on the 1st of march 2025 (negotiable).
Please send a mail with “Postdoc SATURN” object to johann.confais@inrae.fr with a motivation letter, a CV with a list of publications, a summary of past research, and contact information of at least two references.