PhD candidate in Structural Biology of Tuberculosis, Institute M4I, division Nanoscopy, Faculty of...

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. Even though TB is curable, about one and a half million people succumb to it every year. Current treatments are long and with side effects: the need for new antibiotics and vaccines is obvious.

We aim to understand how gene products or proteins work within their cellular environment in health and disease. Our institute houses a state of the art cryo-Light Microscopy/Electron Microscopy correlative workflow from cellular localization, milling with focused ion beam (FIB-SEM), down to cryo-electron tomography, subvolume averaging and image processing to study how these nano-machines work under native conditions.

We seek a talented PhD candidate to join our interdisciplinary team. Our biology research focuses on unraveling, controlling and tempering the pathogenicity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis at a molecular level. The applicant will apply biochemistry to purify and characterize molecular players in isolation. The structural characterization will be mainly done by single particle analysis.

PhD Job Title: Structural insight in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis pathogenicity.
PhD advisers: Peter J. Peters and Raimond Ravelli
Organisation Unit: Nanoscopy division of the Maastricht Multimodal Molecular Imaging institute (M4I).

Recent publications of PhD students from our Lab:

Priming mycobacterial ESX-secreted protein B to form a channel-like structure.
Gijsbers A, Vinciauskaite V, Siroy A, Gao Y, Tria G, Mathew A, Sánchez-Puig N, López-Iglesias C, Peters PJ, Ravelli RBG. - Curr Res Struct Biol. 2021

Structure of the Yersinia injectisome in intracellular host cell phagosomes revealed by cryo FIB electron tomography.
Berger C, Ravelli RBG, López-Iglesias C, Kudryashev M, Diepold A, Peters PJ. - J Struct Biol. 2021 Mar;213(1):107701.

Endocytosed nanogold fiducials for improved in-situ cryo-electron tomography tilt-series alignment.
Berger C, Ravelli RBG, López-Iglesias C, Peters PJ. - J Struct Biol. 2021 Mar;213(1):107698.

Single-particle cryo-EM: alternative schemes to improve dose efficiency.
Zhang Y, Lu PH, Rotunno E, Troiani F, van Schayck JP, Tavabi AH, Dunin-Borkowski RE, Grillo V, Peters PJ, Ravelli RBG. - J Synchrotron Radiat. 2021 Sep 1;28(Pt 5):1343-1356.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis ferritin: a suitable workhorse protein for cryo-EM development.
Gijsbers A, Zhang Y, Gao Y, Peters PJ, Ravelli RBG. - Acta Crystallogr D Struct Biol. 2021

Understanding the invisible hands of sample preparation for cryo-EM.
Weissenberger G, Henderikx RJM, Peters PJ. - Nat Methods. 2021 May;18(5):463-471

Sub-pixel electron detection using a convolutional neural network.
van Schayck JP, van Genderen E, Maddox E, Roussel L, Boulanger H, Fröjdh E, Abrahams JP, Peters PJ, Ravelli RBG. - Ultramicroscopy. 2020 Nov;218:113091

Could Egg White Lysozyme be Solved by Single Particle Cryo-EM?
Zhang Y, Tammaro R, Peters PJ, Ravelli RBG. - J Chem Inf Model. 2020 May 26;60(5):2605-2613.