Researcher in Comparative Genomics Full-time

The Researcher will be working on the project “Effects of polyploidization during adaptive evolution in yeasts (PloidYeast)” lead by Dr. David Peris (PI) and funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN 324253: https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/call-for-proposals/2021/researcher-project-for-scientific-renewal/). The candidate will work in close collaboration with the PI, Dr. Sara Orellana, Dr. Inger Skrede, Prof. Håvard Kauserud, Oslo Mycology Group members (Postdocs, PhD and master students) and researchers at the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA) –CSIC, Spain. In addition, the candidate will be part of an international collaborative research team from Stockholm University, Sweden (Dr. Rike Stelkens); Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio)-CSIC, Spain (Dr. Ana Conesa); Ghent University, Belgium (Dr. Yves Van de Peer); and Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory, USA (Dr. Héctor García). This research team provides an excellent scientific framework, with specialists in mycology, speciation, hybridization, food biotechnology, evolutionary biology, population genomics, multiomics integration and machine learning model applications.

Climatic change and human actions are threatening the sustainability of food security. United Nations 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 can solve UN challenges, that is convert the food chain in a sustainable and a circular process. To accomplish this objective, we will make use of a recurrent evolutionary phenomenon observed in several industrial yeasts. This phenomenon is called polyploidization where the increase of the number of copies of the genome facilitates the adaptation to industrial conditions and might 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 generate the new yeasts and learn how polyploidization improves adaptation to industrial conditions. We know that increasing the number of copies in a yeast, by introducing the genome of multiple yeasts with different but desired industrial traits, generates a new yeast with the combination of the parental traits.

The Researcher will perform comparative genomics of recently generated HiFi PacBio libraries of representative wild strains of a fungal genus. Some of these strains are actively used in the PloidYeast project to generate polyploids due to their interesting industrial phenotypic traits. However, the genomic regions associated with industrial traits are mostly unknown. The polyploids generated with the wild fungi will be evolved in industrial conditions. The Researcher will be responsible of building new bioinformatic pipelines for the study of yeast genomes and their polyploids. 

Tagged as: Life Sciences