Effects of polyploidization during adaptive evolution in yeasts (PloidYeast)

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2021

End date

12/31/2026

Budget

1,398,879 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Climate change, habitat destruction and other human activities are threating the sustainability of food security. UN has launched four aims within the sustainable development plan to maintain and ensure food security. In PloidYeast, we aim to apply a new collection of yeasts to offer new biotechnological approaches that will address the UN challenges and bring the food chain in a more sustainable direction, including more circular processes. To accomplish this objective, we will make use of a recurrent evolutionary phenomenon observed in several industrial yeasts and other organisms. This phenomenon is called polyploidization, which leads to an increase in the number of copies of the genome. Polyploidization facilitates the adaptation of the organism to new environmental conditions, such as the harsh conditions found in the food industry. Through several evolutionary steps, we aim to generate yeasts with desired industrial traits, accommodated to reach the sustainability of the food security. We will apply a multidisciplinary approach combining microbiology, molecular and genetic engineering methods, bioinformatics and mathematical modelling to select and generate a new yeast collection. At the end of the project, we expect to learn how polyploidization improves adaptation to industrial conditions, which will help to solve some of the UN challenges. Not so far, but we already know that by increasing the number of copies in the yeast genome through hybridization will combine traits from the parental yeasts and in this way introduce desired industrial traits.