Postdoctoral fellowship from INRA
Postdoctoral fellowship: Integrative biology analysis and modelling of the influence of host and gut microbiota factors on the piglet sensitivity at weaning
Duration: 24 months
Expected starting date: March 2017
Gross salary: around 2 300 €/month (depending on the experience )
Host institution: INRA (French National Institute for Agricultural Research)
Research Units: UMR1313 GABI Génétique Animale et Biologie Intégrative Domaine de Vilvert 78350 Jouy-en-Josas (http://www6.jouy.inra.fr/gabi_eng/), UMR 791 MoSAR Modélisation systémique appliquée aux ruminants 16 rue Claude-Bernard, 75005 Paris (http://www6.jouy.inra.fr/mosar_eng)
Context & mission: the postdoctoral fellow will join the interdiscisciplinary project PIGLETBIOTA funded by ANR. The main goal of PIGLETBIOTA is to develop research that will contribute to adapt pig production systems to a reduction of antibiotics usage. The project aims at providing knowledge on the implication of host’s genetics and gut microbiota in the adaptive response of piglets to weaning. An experiment design has already been implemented to study the early life of piglets from birth to post-weaning by the analysis of host traits (clinical survey, immunological traits, zootechnical parameters, high density genotyping) and the dynamics of the gut microbiota in this transition period.
The main mission of the postdoc fellow will be to develop statistical and mathematical tools for the analysis of the resulting heterogeneous data and its further integration into a modelling framework that will help identify drivers for increasing resistance at weaning for piglets fed without antibiotics. Ideally, the modelling framework will have two components. Firstly, a statistical modelling component to unveil the interactions between microbiome data, host genetics and weaning traits. Secondly, a dynamic modelling component to reveal biological information related to robustness and sensitivity by analyzing the dynamic trajectory of zootechnical parameters. Together, these modelling approaches will guide the definition/construction of biomarkersable to predict piglet robustness.
The postdoc fellow will work in two teams located at Jouy-en-Josas and Paris. The ideal candidate will have the following characteristics:
Excellent communication skills to interact in an interdisciplinary environment involving geneticists, animal scientists and modellers
- Expertise in multivariate statistics (PLS, PCA, rCCA) and dedicated software (e.g.: R
- Capacity to extract biologically meaningful knowledge from mathematical developments
Previous experience in the analysis of omics data will be a plus
- Expertise in modelling dynamic models (ODE, parameter estimation, sensitivity analysis) and dedicated software (Matlab, Scilab) will be a plus
Job application: the interested candidates should contact Jordi Estellé (Jordi.Estelle@inra.fr) AND Nicolas Friggens (nicolas.friggens@agroparistech.fr) before January 31st, 2017 and provide a detailed CV, letter of motivation and the name of two scientific references.
Some research articles of our teams
- Codrea, M.C., Hojsgaard, S., and Friggens, N.C. (2011). Differential smoothing of time-series measurements to identify disturbances in performance and quantify animal response characteristics: An example using milk yield profiles in dairy cows. Journal of Animal Science 89, 3089-3098. doi: 10.2527/jas.2010-3753.
- Ramayo-Caldas, Y., Mach, N., Lepage, P., Levenez, F., Denis, C., Lemonnier, G., Leplat, J.J., Billon, Y., Berri, M., Doré, J., Rogel- Gaillard, C., Estellé, J. (2016). Phylogenetic network analysis applied to pig gut microbiota identifies an ecosystem structure linked with growth traits. ISME J. 10:2973-2977. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2016.77.
- Sadoul, B., Martin, O., Prunet, P., and Friggens, N.C. (2015). On the Use of a Simple Physical System Analogy to Study Robustness Features in Animal Sciences. PLoS One 10. doi: ARTN e0137333 10.1371/journal.pone.0137333.
- Xiao, L., Estellé, J., Kiilerich, P., Ramayo-Caldas, Y., Xia, Z., Feng, Q., Liang, S., Pedersen, A.O., Kjeldsen, N.J., Liu, C., Maguin, E.,
- Dore, J., Pons, N., Le Chatelier, E., Prifti, E., Li, J., Jia, H., Liu, X., Xu, X., Ehrlich, S.D., Madsen, L., Kristiansen, K., Rogel- Gaillard, C., and Wang, J. (2016). A reference gene catalogue of the pig gut microbiome. Nat Microbiol, 16161. doi: 10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.161.