Doctoral fellow

Organisation/Company Ghent University Research Field Biological sciences » Biology Biological sciences » Other Chemistry » Biochemistry Computer science » Other Medical sciences » Other Technology » Biotechnology Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Application Deadline 22 Oct 2026 - 21:59 (UTC) Country Belgium Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe - MSCA Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

Department WE10 - Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology

Degree Master’s degree (or equivalent) in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, Biomedical Sciences, or a related life-science field that formally entitles the candidate to enrol in a doctoral programme at Ghent University.

Occupancy rate 100%

Vacancy type Research staff

ABOUT GHENT UNIVERSITY

DC10: Mining the functional microproteome landscape using thermal proteome profiling
About ORFeus
ORFeus is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) under Horizon Europe: 15 academic groups, 13 industry and research partners, and a panel of independent academic advisors, training 15 doctoral candidates across Europe. The network investigates the dark proteome, the proteins and peptides made from overlooked or non-canonical open reading frames and what they mean for human disease, combining ribosome profiling and translatomics, proteogenomics, mass spectrometry-based proteomics and immunopeptidomics, large-scale genomics, and machine learning to map novel translation products and test their potential as targets for diagnosis, immunotherapy, and drug development in cancer and beyond.
Each doctoral candidate runs an individual project within this shared program, supported by two academic supervisors, an industry or partner secondment supervisor, and an independent academic advisor. Each project includes a secondment of around three months with a partner organization,as well as network-wide schools, workshops, and conferences.

About Ghent University

Ghent University is a world of its own. Employing more than 15.000 people, it is actively involved in education and research, management and administration, as well as technical and social service provision on a daily basis.
With its 11 faculties and more than 85 departments offering state-of-the-art study programmes grounded in research in a wide range of academic fields, Ghent University is a logical choice for its staff and students.

YOUR TASKS

You will join the group of Prof. Petra Van Damme at the Laboratory of Microbiology, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, where you will work in an interdisciplinary research environment combining molecular microbiology, bacterial infection biology, and advanced proteomics, including thermal proteome profiling, to study microproteins and the dark proteome. You will work closely with the group of Dr. Danny Sahtoe at the Hubrecht Institute, who brings complementary expertise in computational protein design and structural biology. You will enroll as a PhD candidate at Ghent University and participate in the doctoral training programme of the Doctoral School of Sciences.

The position

Only a fraction of the genome codes for the proteins in standard reference catalogs. Many small open reading frames (smORFs) scattered across the genome are translated into microproteins that these catalogs miss, and while growing numbers of microproteins are being discovered, their biological functions and the molecular interactions through which they act remain largely unknown. Thermal proteome profiling (TPP), a mass-spectrometry method that measures how the thermal stability of a protein shifts when its binding partners or conditions change, offers a way to assign function to these previously hidden proteins.

This project will systematically characterize the functional landscape of microproteins in the enteropathogen Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, using TPP across smORF deletion strains and multiple conditions to to identify functional associations and candidate interaction partners across the Salmonella microproteome. It sits at the center of ORFeus Work Package 2, which moves from discovery to function: the structural and biophysical data it generates feed an iterative design-test cycle with a computational protein-design project, while the standardized TPP workflows developed here are adapted for host-pathogen proteomics elsewhere in the network. The work also connects to evolutionary analysis of microprotein function and to the wider consortium through the shared ORFeome platform.
Main tasks:

• Develop and standardize thermal proteome profiling protocols to measure changes in protein stability and abundance across a panel of smORF deletion strains