Plant Bioinformatics Specialist

In Nestlé R&D, we are committed to developing innovative food, drink and nutritional products to improve quality of life and contribute to a healthier future.

The 3,900 people who work for us around the world - from scientists and engineers to regulatory experts and chefs - are key to our success. Research contributes to the company's growth and enables the rapid development of products and services that benefit our consumers and our planet.

The Nestlé R&D Center located in the Loire Valley in Tours (France), is part of the Nestlé Institute of Agricultural Sciences within the Nestlé Research Organization whose main center is located in Lausanne, Switzerland. Nestlé Research combines fundamental science at the highest level, high-end analytical platforms leveraged by all research teams, and strong capabilities to accelerate the translation of science into innovation. The Plant Science team builds knowledge on strategic crops with the aim of developing new plant materials in order to deliver quality products through better and sustainable farming.

**What we offer at Nestlé**
- Nestlé R&D Center - Notre Dame D’Oé (Tours, France)
- Full-time contract
- Genuine opportunities for career and personal development
- Modern “smart office” locations providing agile & collaborative workspaces
- Dynamic international working environment
- Attractive package, caring management, flexible working hours or remote work, allow you to evolve in a pleasant environment. You benefit from training throughout your career, aimed at promoting your development towards different roles within the Group.

**Context**:
Support Plant Science by using relevant state of the art bioinformatic tools and digging into large next generation sequencing datasets to optimize the discovery of new markers and to accelerate decision-making for relevant plant breeding KPIs.

**The role**:

- Identify, assess, select, implement and use relevant state of the art bioinformatics tools to analyze and assess the quality of the next generation sequencing data.
- Valorize historical data and propose concrete actions to complete the digital catalog of data for a complete analysis of the genetic diversity of the varieties and accessions considered.
- Analyze short and large sequencing reads, evaluate the quality of the data generated and share the results with the quantitative geneticist for the association studies to fulfill the needs of the breeding teams
- Analyze the population structure and genetic diversity of coffee, cocoa and other relevant crops using pan-genomes and sequencing data.
- Valorize genetic diversity in the frame of our breeding programs to guide the development of new elite, climate resilient and disease resistant varieties.
- Enrich the catalogs of molecular markers essential for the analyses of genetic diversity, conformity and the prediction of traits of to the company’s breeding.
- Identify leverageable genetic variation linked to biodiversity and traceability forrelevant breeding KPIs.
- Keep abreast of and incorporate relevant new genotyping approaches and technologies.
- Mainstream the use of relevant genomic tools to improve marker assisted selection.
- Implement relevant strategies by establishing collaboration with major Universities and Institutes locally and internationally and develop collaborative activities.
- Manage all or part of the activities of research projects (analysis of the brief, planning and achievement of activities, production of R&D reports and publications, internal/external communication)
- Use clear written and oral communication to present your results to the project manager / group leader.

**Profile**:

- 5 years of experience as plant bioinformatician project lead or lab manager
- Experience of collaborative activities between local and remote laboratories
- Strong experience in selecting and in implementing bioinformatics workflows, AI and machine learning tools.
- Solid experience in Bioinformatics applied to coffee & cacao including genomic prediction modeling.
- Solid knowledge in quantitative genetics and in genomics
- Experience in developing workflows and pipelines for the efficient analysis of next generation sequencing reads (alignment, variant calling, quality control filtering, etc )
- Experience in analyzing short and long sequencing reads, evaluating the quality of the data generated.
- Skills in genome imputation
- Experience with de novo genome assemblies