Salary from £27316 pa dependent on experience

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a world leader in genomic research, with an expanding scientific programme dedicated to understanding gene function in health & disease.

We are seeking an experienced bioinformation who is highly motivated to improve the quality of annotation provided in the GENCODE human reference gene set.

This is a developer position within Ensembl's automatic gene team. The role includes computational gene set comparison of automatic and manual annotation, feedback to HAVANA and the other GENCODE collaborators, and integrating ENCODE data and methods into the Ensembl annotation system.

The role involves interactions with members of the HAVANA group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI), the Ensembl groups based at the WTSI and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the wider ENCODE community via conference calls and international meetings of the consortium.

Essential Skills
In order to fulfil this role you will:
•be a bioinformatician with at least a Master's level qualification in bioinformatics plus practical experience in the field of genome informatics;
•have an excellent working knowledge of Perl;
•have UNIX experience and familiarity with relational databases;
•have excellent communication skills;
•working experience and understanding of commonly used bioinformatics programs and algorithms, such as BLAST;
•demonstrable problem solving skills;
•attention to detail.

Ideal Skills
•experience scripting using the Ensembl API;
•large scale genomic analysis particularly genome annotation;
•experience using MySQL

Other information
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) launched a public research consortium named ENCODE, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements to carry out a project to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence. The aim of GENCODE as a sub-project of the ENCODE scale-up project is to annotate all evidence-based gene features in the entire human genome at a high accuracy (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/PostGenomics/encode). The result will be a set of annotations including all protein-coding loci with alternatively transcribed variants, non-coding loci with transcript evidence, and pseudogenes. The process to create this annotation involves manual curation, different computational analysis and targeted experimental approaches. Putative loci can be verified by wet-lab experiments and computational predictions will be analysed manually. The international team of eight institutes working in the GENCODE project is headed by Tim Hubbard at the WT Sanger Institute.

Ensembl is a world leader in automatic genome analysis. The Ensembl project (http://www.ensembl.org/) is a collaboration between the WTSI and the EBI and provides to the scientific community annotation for approximately 50 genomes. We have one of the world's largest dedicated computer resources for genomic analysis. As part of the GENCODE consortium we collaborate closely with the HAVANA manual annotation team in order to improve the human gene annotation in an effort to complete the gene set.

This position is fixed-term until September 2011.

Benefits
Salary range £27316 pa dependent on experience

The Institute has excellent purpose built facilities on the Genome Campus, Hinxton on the outskirts of Cambridge. We offer a comprehensive range of benefits including a final salary pension scheme and excellent on-site facilities. Further details can be found on our website https://jobs.sanger.ac.uk,

To submit your CV and apply for this job please go to https://jobs.sanger.ac.uk, to register and apply on line.

The closing date for applications is 26 March 2010