Postdoc in Fungal enzymology and Food science - DTU Bioengineering

<p>Are you passionate about sustainability and innovation? Do you want to contribute to reshaping the food supply chain and creating a new and sustainable production system? If so, we invite you to join the UPCYFUN project at DTU as a Postdoctoral Researcher. UPCYFUN is a collaboration between DTU, Aalborg University, TDI and the private companies ProteinFrontiers, Pexinno, HNH-consult, Lyras, and Vestjyllands Andel, financed by the Innovation Foundation.</p> <p>In this position, your work will focus on functional screening of DTU’s large fungal strain collection (IBT) to identify novel production hosts using a combination of robotics-assisted experiments and data mining in our 30 years of legacy data regarding the safety, metabolomics, and physiology of the strains. The UPCYFUN project is a unique opportunity for you to make a lasting societal impact, while also strengthening your research profile within fungal-based biotechnology, cell factory engineering, robotics, and data science – a highly sought-after profile in both academia and industry.</p> <p>You will join the Section for Synthetic Biology at DTU Bioengineering, which offers a unique open research environment that balances foundational science, multidisciplinary research, and innovation in close collaboration with leading national and international industrial and academic partners. </p> <p><strong>The UPCYFUN project and your responsibilities </strong></p> <p><strong>Your primary focus will be conducting research</strong> to create foundational knowledge and develop the technologies needed to identify, characterize and mature novel fungal production chassis for fermentation-based production. This project specifically aims to identify a series of filamentous fungi for protein production of food ingredients and proteins/enzymes in general. The sought-after strains must grow and sustain high productivity on a series of new production media, also developed in the UPCYFUN, that utilize various currently unutilized biological waste streams from industry. The strains must further be safe (mycotoxin-free) and display process robustness to allow for the use of the wide range of feedstocks available throughout the seasons.</p> <p>You will join a dynamic and interdisciplinary team of scientists with expertise in mycology, laboratory automation (robotics), molecular biology, analytical chemistry, data science, and food science.</p> <p><strong>The REFINES project </strong>is funded by the Innovation Foundation’s Grand Solutions program and is a collaboration between DTU, Aalborg University, Danish Technological Institute, and a series of private companies, including ProteinFrontiers, Pexinno, HNH-consult, Lyras, and Vestjyllands Andel. The unique collaboration provides access to exclusive biological materials and detailed process information, allowing the consortium to develop a deep understanding of the production process and to pioneer the creation of new and sustainable solutions.</p> <p><strong>You will be responsible</strong> for conducting and driving the research project forward at DTU, with the aim of identifying new host strains and understanding strain robustness (relevant traits and their molecular genetic basis). Initially, you will collaborate with the mycology team (IBT collection) to select 5000 fungal isolates (based on legacy data) for which you will test their general performance (growth) in a series of new media. Next, you will work closely with our automation specialists to develop efficient, robotic-assisted screening and characterization assays (based on existing robotics capabilities in the Section), enabling you to perform high-throughput screening and characterization of the selected sub-library of fungal isolates. To identify the best new host chassis for protein production, you will next focus on qualifying the initial hits, with data sets on fermentation properties (manufacturability and robustness), metabolomics (safety), exoproteome (protease activity), and genomics (safety), using robotics-assisted setups. The best-performing strains will next, in collaboration with AAU, be genetically engineered to test the strains’ heterologous protein expression potential and to optimize the chassis for protein production. The generated data will enable you to address research questions such as: Which traits are key for robustness, and can they be identified early in a screening setup? What is the molecular genetic foundation of these traits? How can we reliably predict a strain’s robustness and compatibility with growth medium composition?</p> <p>The project’s goal is to discover and mature a series of new industrially relevant fungal production chassis that can be commercialized by the industrial partner(s). The project will furthermore create a series of new robotic-assisted screening and characterization pipelines, and unique data sets that can form the foundation for future projects (led by you?) focused on utilizing the unique DTU funga