{"id":12557,"date":"2026-10-07T09:58:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gimm.pt\/?post_type=jobs&p=12557"},"modified":"2026-10-07T09:58:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:58:19","slug":"postdoctoral-researcher-32","status":"publish","type":"jobs","link":"https:\/\/gimm.pt\/pt-pt\/jobs\/postdoctoral-researcher-32\/","title":{"rendered":"Postdoctoral Researcher"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Join Mois\u00e9s Mallo’s Lab at GIMM as a Postdoctoral Researcher<\/strong>
An exciting postdoctoral research opportunity is open in Mois\u00e9s Mallo\u2019s laboratory at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM) to investigate the developmental and evolutionary mechanisms underlying limb loss in snakes, as part of a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) project.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Project and the Role<\/strong>
The project aims to uncover why snakes and certain lizard species lack limbs despite being phylogenetically classified as tetrapods. It combines comparative developmental analyses of embryos from limbed and limbless species, with a particular focus on the prospective hindlimb-forming region, followed by functional validation of the findings using genetic approaches in mouse embryos. The project brings together three research groups with complementary expertise in reptile biology, mouse genetics and bioinformatics.
Work in the Mallo laboratory will initially focus on the analysis of wild-type and limb-deficient mouse embryos to identify the molecular and regulatory mechanisms underlying hindlimb development. These studies will integrate single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single cell ATAC sequencing (scATAC seq) performed on the same cells, enabling the simultaneous characterization of gene expression and chromatin regulatory landscapes. At a later stage, targeted mutant embryos will be generated using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to modulate the expression of selected genes or reconstruct chromatin regulatory landscapes characteristic of limbless species, thereby directly testing their contribution to limb loss.
The successful candidate will contribute to the experimental work performed in the Mallo laboratory, including the analysis of mouse embryos, generation and analysis of targeted mutant embryos, and integration and interpretation of molecular, genomic and regulatory data.
This position also offers the opportunity to collaborate closely with the project’s international partners, including Martin Cohn at the University of Florida (USA) and Laura Elo at the University of Turku (Finland), and to engage with leading experts across complementary disciplines.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Main Responsibilities:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n