Postdoctoral Researcher on Droplet microfluidics, molecular programming and high throughput enzyme screening

With 450 employees of 40 different nationalities, the IEMN brings together most of the research in Hauts-de-France, from nanoscience to instrumentation in the field of microtechnology. Its budget of €28M enables it to develop state of the art miniaturised technologies in electronics, photonics, telecommunications, health technologies, electrical energy, the Internet of Things and transport. It has 1600m2 of cleanroom and a dedicated L2 biology lab

The transition of our societies towards greater sustainability will increasingly rely on the enzymatic transformation of renewable biomass into high-value commodities. Yet, this step remains difficult on lignocellulose (LC) due to its high degree of recalcitrance, which involves specific physical processes which are often ignored when searching for efficient enzymes.

Ultra-high-throughput activity screenings (uHTS) offer nowadays the possibility to explore immense enzyme diversity, a necessity to find adequate LC active enzymes especially when they are used in combination. Alas, uHTS are currently based on soluble fluorogenic substrate analogs limiting the relevance of their results.

In this project we propose to implement a novel droplet microfluidic uHTS approach which associates a molecular programming method to the production of micron sized hydrogel beads to emulate complex substrates. We aim to achieve single enzyme sensitivity at 10^8/h throughput, making possible the discovery of must-find enzymes active on recalcitrant substrates. Moreover, by relying on the unique versatility of molecular programming, we will develop an approach able to perform the selection of the best enzyme without having to sort droplets and analyse their content.

We will require a postdoctoral researcher will be in charge of droplet generation for beads synthesis, hydrogel chemistry, microfluidic chip design for beads encapsulation in molecular program droplet. She/He will be in charge of setting up the microfluidic setup