We are seeking a hands-on scientist to build phage and yeast-display workflows for discovering binders that target insect receptors.
You will develop molecular display workflows to screen designed binders against insect target receptors, with an initial focus on phage display and bead-based panning and the opportunity to implement yeast display and other display formats as the platform matures.
You will take pooled binder libraries from oligo pool through cloning, display, counterselection, enrichment, sequencing, and hit validation. You will work closely with our protein biochemistry and virology teams to discover binders that can be expressed, characterized, engineered, and ultimately displayed on engineered VLPs.
You will:
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 fit-for-purpose readouts.
Prepare enriched display pools for NGS and work with the team to 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.
What You Bring
PhD in protein engineering, molecular biology, synthetic biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, or a 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, including poor library coverage, display bias, target misfolding, avidity artifacts, sticky binders, amplification bias, sequencing noise, and false enrichment.
Comfort using NGS-derived count tables, enrichment plots, depletion data, and replicate structure to prioritize binders for validation.
A rigorous experimental style and the ability to turn ambiguous screening results into controlled, decision-enabling follow-up experiments.
Excitement to work at the bench in a small founding team where the binder-discovery platform is still being built.
What We Value
Molagri is a small team building a novel bioinsecticide platform. We value scientists who design rigorous experiments, think creatively when the obvious approach fails, communicate clearly, and treat their teammates with kindness and respect. The right person for this role will be hands-on, hard-working, intellectually honest, and excited to help build a platform from first principles.
Source: Y Combinator job 116349. Listed on YC when retrieved 2026-11-02.
