PostDoctoral Researcher in Yeast Biotechnology

at  Universiteit Gent

JOB DESCRIPTION

BioPort is a young and dynamic research group composed of 6 researchers at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Centre for Synthetic Biology of Ghent University focussing on several aspects of Industrial Biotechnology and SynBio. We work on several fundamental and applied topics of microbial transport systems to promote compound membrane crossing, and production of hydrophobic compounds, all in a synthetic biology context (check our website at https://csb-bioport.mystrikingly.com/ and www.csb.ugent.be). You will be hired on the FWO-WEAVE project “Study and engineering of C1 TRansport over Yeast membranes: towards carbon-neutral microbial cell factories (CiTrY)” where you will take the lead in the transporter protein discovery and engineering and coordinate the collaboration with the Austrian project partner.
Below the abstract of the CiTrY project you will be working on:
Microbial cell factories like specialized bacteria, yeast and fungi, are used to produce relevant compounds and engineered biomolecules such as commodities, fine chemicals, food ingredients and biopharmaceuticals. Tailor-made robust microorganisms displaying novel biological behaviors produce these products in a non-chemical way utilizing nature’s toolset, in general using renewable inputs such as glucose or industrial side streams.

C1 feedstocks, such as methane, methanol, formate, CO2 and CO, have important advantages over traditional organic carbon sources like glucose. They are cheap, can be obtained from CO2 in a renewable way, do not compete as food or animal feed and do not require extensive pre-processing from complex agricultural side-streams. Implementing C1 substrates in microbial cell factories would ensure a circular carbon economy that is inherently sustainable. However, due to the relative novelty of this approach, further work will be required to have abiotic C1 substrates compete with biological feedstocks. The CiTrY project will contribute to this goal by investigating and improving transport mechanisms of the C1 substrates over outer and organelle membranes of the microbial cell factories. Underexplored proteins and proteins families will be investigated, advanced protein engineering strategies and high-throughput screening will be conducted, and a novel organelle membrane targeting approach will be developed.

• At least 70% of your assignment will be spent on academic research.
• Other tasks include the guiding and coaching of PhD students, coordination and communication in relation to the CiTrY project, small tasks to support education, grant writing, etc.

Please refer the Job description for details