Scientist / Senior Scientist, Molecular Display and Binder Discovery
About the role
Hands-on scientist to build phage and yeast-display workflows for discovering binders targeting insect receptors, with a focus on phage display, bead-based panning, and later yeast display, within Molagri’s early-stage binder-discovery platform.
Responsibilities
- Build phage-display workflows for screening pooled libraries of designed binders.
- Clone pooled oligo libraries into display vectors and establish QC gates for library coverage, insert quality, diversity, and carryover.
- Produce, rescue, purify, titer, and QC phage libraries for panning campaigns.
- Design and execute bead-based panning campaigns against purified insect target proteins.
- Design counterselection strategies against beads, affinity tags, off-target proteins, orthologs, homologs, and nonspecific binders.
- Track enrichment across panning rounds using phage titering, qPCR, ELISA, NGS, or other readouts.
- Prepare enriched display pools for NGS and interpret enrichment, depletion, replicate consistency, and sequence-level artifacts.
- Pick, express, and screen individual binders by phage ELISA, soluble expression, bead-based binding, plate-based assays, BLI, SPR, flow cytometry, or related methods.
- Implement yeast-display workflows, including library construction, display QC, target staining, FACS-based sorting, and affinity-ranking strategies.
- Compare phage display, yeast display, and orthogonal screening formats for recovery of folded, specific, high-affinity binders.
- Troubleshoot failures in library cloning, transformation efficiency, phage rescue, target presentation, nonspecific binding, pool collapse, PCR bias, weak enrichment, and hit reproducibility.
- Establish SOPs, screening records, construct maps, library documentation, NGS sample records, and data packages for binder progression.
Qualifications
- PhD in protein engineering, molecular biology, synthetic biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, or related field, or equivalent industry experience.
- Hands-on experience with phage display, yeast display, or another genotype-linked display technology.
- Direct experience building, screening, or analyzing pooled display libraries.
- Strong molecular biology skills, including primer design, PCR, pooled cloning, transformation, library QC, sequence analysis, and troubleshooting.
- Experience with binder-screening workflows such as magnetic bead panning, counterselection, phage ELISA, yeast display, FACS, soluble protein expression, affinity maturation, or NGS-guided hit recovery.
- Working knowledge of protein-binding assay formats such as ELISA, bead-based binding, flow cytometry, BLI, SPR, HTRF, fluorescence polarization, or plate-based fluorescence assays.
- Ability to reason through display-campaign failure modes (library coverage, display bias, target misfolding, etc.).
- Comfort using NGS-derived count tables, enrichment plots, depletion data, and replicate structure to prioritize binders for validation.
- Rigorous experimental style and ability to turn ambiguous screening results into controlled follow-up experiments.
- Excitement to work in a small founding team where the binder-discovery platform is still being built.
Skills
About Molagri
Biopesticides that are safe for humans and bees.
Molagri develops safer, more effective pesticides for agriculture. We design biopesticides that hit a precise molecular target unique to pest insects, knocking out pests while sparing pollinators, beneficial insects, and the wider ecosystem. By modeling how pests are likely to evolve, we stay a step ahead of resistance, keeping our products effective against the pests of today and tomorrow. The higher efficacy and biobased production will also contribute to emissions reductions in both manufacturing and field use. Our founders are PhD lab mates from the University of Toronto who have worked together for six years and published in Nature Communications and Nature Microbiology.
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