Mots-Clés

evolution of enzyme features metabolic network

Description

Context. Metabolic reactions form networks that are essential to transforming nutrients into energy and useful building blocks. As essential are enzymes that catalyze these reactions. Yet, despite their contribution to competition at the most basic level, enzymes are extremely diverse and sometimes only moderately efficient. No less puzzling is the presence of a large amount of redundancy in metabolic networks – meaning that some enzymes are possibly useless. This project aims at understanding this conundrum by studying the joint evolution of enzyme features and the structure of the metabolic network. This involves (i) building and analyzing mechanistic population genetics models to get an idea of what enzymes should look like, and (ii) comparing these predictions to published data.

Mission. The successful candidate will build mathematical or computational models to address the question above, that include: - enzymes whose expression and kinetic features change by mutation (possibly using existing code written during the PhD of Florian Labourel) - gene duplications and deletions that may change the structure of the metabolic network.

The ideal candidate should: - have experience in building / analyzing mathematical or computational models, preferably in evolution - be familiar with population genetics concepts or be keen to learn them - enjoy dealing with mechanistic aspects/ have an appetite for reading and discovering how things work. Not ticking all these boxes might be fine, please get in touch if this is the case. Not having worked on enzymes, or even at this level of biological organization, is also fine. The description above gives the general direction that the postdoc may take initially but other short projects may be started, either led by the postdoc or just involving her / his contribution.

Supervision. Etienne Rajon is the main supervisor of the project. He has produced models of evolution at several levels of organization (networks are often involved) and recently started working on enzymes. He is heading the Evolution, Behaviour and Adaptation Group, so be prepared to learn about mate choice in wasps, sociality in marmots or personality in birds. Sabine Peres – a specialist of metabolic network architectures – is also involved, mostly in the data analysis part of the project.