Position Summary:

Twist Biosciences is looking for a Research Associate / Senior Research Associate (Protein/Enzyme Engineering) to join our advanced development team. The candidate will work as a part of a highly collaborative team in a data-driven multidisciplinary environment in the areas of DNA data storage, diagnostics, and therapeutics.

The candidate will be involved in the execution and development of protein engineering workflow, enzyme design, and optimization as well as directed evolution of various proteins/enzymes.

The successful candidate will play a critical role in our new protein/enzyme engineering group and be responsible for high-throughput cloning, expression & purification, screening of enzyme candidates, using high throughput robotics or droplet-based transcription-translation workflows, and developing assays for protein performance under various conditions.

You will have a passion for working in a fast-paced and highly multidisciplinary environment, are very self-motivated, well-organized and a highly productive and curious scientist that can design and perform the experiments quickly and efficiently and provide and present well analyzed data to the multidisciplinary team.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Apply directed evolution methods to engineer proteins/enzymes with novel or improved binding properties, catalytic efficiencies and other characteristics
• Characterization of the physicochemical properties of newly evolved enzymes
• High-Throughput Protein Purification (HTP) and large scale library screening
• HTP assay development and optimization
• Automation and liquid handling systems
• Actively participate in library design discussions

Requirements

• BS or MS in molecular biology, biochemistry, chemical biology or related discipline with at least 5 (BS) or 3 (MS) years of industry experience in Biochemistry and protein/enzyme engineering
• Experience in directed protein evolution techniques

What You’ll Bring to the Team

• Strong wet lab skills in protein expression, purification and characterization (affinity, ion exchange, size exclusion) FPLC, SDS-PAGE etc.
• Hands-on experience using capillary electrophoresis systems (SeqStudio and LabChip) is highly preferred
• Experience enzymatic/kinetic assay and protein-protein/protein-substrate interaction is preferred
• Experience advanced molecular biology techniques of variant library generation
• Experience in critical protein structure visualization and analysis
• Ability to handle large scale library screening and data analysis
• Experience with automated liquid handling systems (Hamilton, Felix etc.,) is a plus
• Knowledge of analysis of next generation DNA sequencing datasets and homology modeling. Analysis and interpretation of sequence-function relationship, interpretation of contribution of mutations to desired properties of gene variants is a plus.
• Experience with biochemical assays using nucleoside triphosphates and oligonucleotide synthesis is a plus.
• Data analysis and visualization skills are preferable (e.g R, Matlab, Python) but not required
• Excellent communication (oral and written), documentation (record keeping, lab notebook, reports, SOPs), organization and interpersonal skills.

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