Salary: £34308 - £40,931 (restricted due to grant funding available)

FTE: 1.0

Term: Fixed Term (36 months)

Closing date: 19 March 2023

The dispersal of GLUT4 within the plasma membrane is a poorly understood action of insulin and may represent a key point of biological control of relevance across cell biology. Our group has shown that the plasma membrane localised scaffold protein EFR3A and its binding partner phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase type III are required for insulin-stimulated glucose transport in adipocytes and that knockdown of EFR3A inhibits insulin-stimulated glucose transporter (GLUT4) dispersal within the plasma membrane.

This project will seek to define how EFR3A and phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase III control GLUT4 dispersal, to understand whether this mechanism of regulation is restricted to GLUT4 or also applies to other plasma membrane resident proteins, and to define the mechanism by which insulin engages with this dispersal machinery.

Our work will provide new molecular insight into a newly identified mechanism of plasma membrane regulation which is likely to be of wide interest across the cell biology community.

Applications are welcomed for this BBSRC funded post which is available for 36 months. Candidates will have a PhD in an appropriate discipline (biology, biomedical engineering or physics will be considered as relevant for this post), and experience in one or more of the following areas: cell biology/membrane trafficking/cell culture/genome editing/super-resolution imaging are essential.

https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/gouldgwynprofessor/

https://gwyngould.wixsite.com/strathclydelab

Informal enquiries about the post can be directed to Prof Gwyn Gould, (gwyn.gould@strath.ac.uk).

Formal interviews for this post will be held on 03/04/2023.