Master thesis - Mating and genome engineering of the yeast Pichia pastoris

Most yeasts can undergo a sexual cycle including mating, meiosis, and spore formation, leading to a recombination of genomes of the mating partners. While this cycle is well understood for a few model yeasts, there is still a lot of open questions for many yeasts of biotechnological interest, such as Pichia pastoris. We have recently published the first stable mating-type strains, and an in-depth characterization of mating regulation (Heistinger et al. 2017. Mol Cell Biol. doi: 10.1128/MCB.00398-17).

This opens huge opportunities to recombine natural genomes, engineer complex genetic traits and evolve production strains.
To leverage the potential, this master thesis will explore the mating ability of appr. 20 strains of P. pastoris and closely related species, characterize the offspring with biochemical and genetic methods, and evaluate the potential to obtain new strains with superior productivity or growth features.

The work will include:
Integration of marker genes with CRISPR/Cas9
Mating experiments on plate and in liquid cultures
Flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy
Phenotyping and genotyping, sequence analysis

We are looking for a highly motivated and ambitious Master Student who wants to join our group and is interested in this topic!

Start: March 2018

If you are interested please contact:

Prof. Diethard Mattanovich
Tel.: (+43) 1 / 47654-79042
email: diethard.mattanovich@boku.ac.at

Lina Heistinger
email: lina.heistinger@boku.ac.at