About the job
BluumBio is a Berkeley-based startup engineering bacteria and plants to degrade toxic compounds and restore contaminated sites. We believe pollution is one of the greatest unmet challenges of the 21st century and are dedicated to coming up with innovative, bio-based solutions.
If you’re motivated to do good in the world and are believe synthetic biology can help, we’d love to hear from you.
Your role:
As our Enzyme Scientist, you will play an essential role in discovering new enzymes, optimizing enzyme activity, and contribute to engineering bacteria and/or plants to express these enzymes. You will be working with two Synthetic Biologists and a Machine Learning scientist. The successful candidate will have experience with molecular biology, enzyme optimization, and enzyme assay development. You will also have the opportunity to work on other areas of running a startup, from sitting on meetings with clients to interacting with regulators. We believe in science education and outreach and encourage all BluumBio employees to publish opinion pieces and to participate in STEM public engagement opportunities.
Responsibilities:
• Design, plan, and execute experiments to advance projects to help meet company goals
• Conduct in depth literature search to guide gene editing and enzyme optimization
• Develop high throughput (96 well) assays to quickly screen enzyme libraries (in vitro or in E. coli and plant protoplasts)
• Analyze, interpret data and deliver results for time-sensitive goals
• Develop new protocols as needed
• Keep detailed records of experiments in a physical or online lab book
• Be able to manage multiple projects and deadlines
• Possibility to train and mentor junior scientists in the lab
Essential requirements:
• PhD in (Bio)chemistry, Bioengineering, Biophysics, Molecular Biology or a related discipline working directly on topics related to enzyme characterization or engineering
• 2+ years of industrial/startup experience working directly on enzyme engineering efforts particularly with proven results
• Diverse knowledge base of both wet lab and computational tools (e.g., DNA-to-phenotype relationships) for delivering improved enzymes
• Experience with molecular modeling and visualization tools such as Rosetta and PyMol, along with scripting tools (e.g., Python, R, MatLab) for analyses of large datasets
• Hands-on expertise using automation to accelerate enzyme screening workflows
• Scientific rigor toward continuous evaluation of experimental design, noise/variability, reproducibility, and outcomes
• Demonstrated ability to formulate hypothesis, design experiments, analyze data, interpret results, trouble-shoot experiments, prepare reports, and present results
• Excellent organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills
• Self-motivated, team-oriented, and a proactive driving force of execution
• Interest in working in a startup
Desired requirements:
• Prior experience in molecular biology, physiology, or biochemistry related to microbial and/or plant biotransformation of toxic compounds
• Experience in modeling metabolic networks
• Use of computational biology to rationally design enzymes for enhanced activity and substrate specificity
• Experience developing de novo enzymes
• Experience in attracting grant or other funding
• Metabolomics (LC/MS and or GC/MS)
• Experience in automated lab systems and/or executing remote lab experiments (e.g. through Culture Biosciences)
BLUUMBIO
