The Comparative Genomics & Metagenomics Lab (CGMLab, https://cgmlab.org) at the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP, Madrid) is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for the EU-funded ORIGIN project.

About The Project

ORIGIN (Optimised Routing and Industrial Generation of Ingredients from Nature) is a highly interdisciplinary European project focusing on the production of valuable botanical ingredients. The project's central ambition is to develop an AI-driven, digitally integrated bioproduction platform that will transform the sourcing of natural molecules, shifting it away from ecologically damaging wild harvesting towards sustainable precision fermentation. By combining AI-powered discovery, retrosynthesis, generative enzyme engineering and rapid multi-host prototyping, ORIGIN can accelerate the development of bio-identical ingredients for the nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries up to the pre-commercial stage (TRL 7). Project info at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101289831

Our group leads Work Package 1 (WP1): AI-Assisted Digital Bioprospecting & BGC Mining. The successful candidate will help explore the "unknown microbial biosphere" to identify novel enzymes and Biosynthetic Gene Clusters (BGCs) that serve as the creative input for engineering new microbial strains.

About Our Group

CGMLab studies the diversity and biological complexity of microbial communities through genomic sequencing and computational methods, developing bioinformatics tools and resources for comparative genomics and metagenomics. Learn more at https://cgmlab.org

Responsibilities

Metagenomic mining to discover enzymatic functions and pathways oriented to producing industrially-relevant biocompounds (e.g. botanicals).
Large-scale genomic mining across massive metagenome-assembled genome (MAG) databases (e.g. SPIRE, >1M uncultured species) using homology-based searches (DIAMOND, MMseqs, HMM profiles).
Structural bioprospecting with protein language models (ProstT5, ESM) and AlphaFold to find distant structural / functional homologues that sequence searches miss.
Pathway & BGC reconstruction: high-resolution functional annotation (eggNOG-mapper) and context-aware genomic analysis (synteny, antiSMASH) to recover operons and complete biosynthetic pathways.
Attending European project meetings, writing reports and scientific articles, and supervising related work.

Required

Experience in mining and functional annotation of metagenomic data.
Fluency in HPC and Linux environments, genomic data analysis and processing pipelines (all technical work is bioinformatic).

Valued

Basic knowledge of and interest in biochemistry, structural biology and comparative genomics.
Knowledge of microbial ecology and genomics.

Conditions

Postdoctoral position, ≈ €41,000 gross per year.
Duration: 3.5–4 years depending on start date.
Based at CBGP, Madrid. On-site presence required; partial remote work possible when tasks allow.

How to apply: submit your CV, a short letter of interest, up to three references and relevant links, and answer the questions below.