Research Associate, Next Generation Sequencing
Ginkgo Bioworks
Boston, MA, USA
Posted on Thursday, May 11, 2023
Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms.
Ginkgo's NGS group enables diverse synthetic biology projects by providing sequencing services to organism engineering teams. Our services include DNA and RNA sequencing using short read (Illumina) and long read (PacBio and Oxford Nanopore) platforms. We confirm synthetic constructs, genomic edits, and expression profiles of engineered organisms. We help develop the next generation of therapeutics in RNA and gene therapy.
As a Research Associate in our NGS group, you will empower Ginkgo’s organism engineers with high-quality and high-throughput RNA extraction, RNA sequencing, and qPCR services. By adding your own expertise to an interdisciplinary team of bench scientists, computational biologists, data scientists, and software engineers, your role will be critical to developing world-changing methods for engineering biology.
Responsibilities
- Enable the work of cell engineering by providing cutting edge NGS services across a wide range of systems including mammalian cells and tissues.
- Coordinate with external research organizations and animal facilities to empower Ginkgo’s development of the next generation of therapeutics.
- Improve and perform tissue RNA extraction protocols.
- Improve and perform qPCR and RNA sequencing protocols.
- Expand your abilities and the team’s capabilities by learning new skills, developing new nucleic acid extraction methods, and improving our existing offerings including qPCR and RNAseq.
- Maintain excellent customer service by coordinating with Ginkgo’s growing mammalian program teams to process samples and return results for ground-breaking studies.
- Demonstrate excellence by troubleshooting issues and maintaining our high standards for quality.
- Be a team player by participating in general laboratory maintenance and other laboratory duties.
Minimum Requirements
- BS/MS in a relevant field of biological sciences and a minimum of 2+ years of experience
- Experience with RNA and/or DNA extraction from animal tissues.
- Experience with PCR and/or qPCR.
- Ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
- Flexibility and willingness to learn in a rapidly changing, growing organization.
Preferred Capabilities and Experience
- Experience with DNA and RNA extraction from filamentous fungi and bacteria is a plus.
- Experience with qPCR assay and primer design is a plus.
- Experience with high-throughput automation.
To learn more about Ginkgo, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com/press/ or check out some curated press below:
We also feel that it’s important to point out the obvious here – there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. Our goal is to help drive that change. Ginkgo is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion and embraces how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.
We’re developing a powerful biological engineering platform, so we must remain mindful of the many ways our technology can – and will – impact people around the world. We care about how our platform is used, and having a diverse team to build it gives us the best chance that it’s something we’ll be proud of as it continues to grow. Therefore, it’s critical that we incorporate the diverse voices and visions of all those who play a role in the future of biology.
It is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants.
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