Climate change, habitat destruction and other human activities are threating the sustainability of food security.
We aim to apply a new collection of yeasts to offer new biotechnological approaches to bring the food chain to produce healthy and sustainable products.
To accomplish this objective, we will make use of a recurrent evolutionary phenomenon, polyploidization, observed in several industrial yeasts and other organisms. This phenomenon facilitates adaptation industrial conditions. Through several evolutionary steps, we aim to generate yeasts with desired industrial traits. 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.
Not so far, but we already know that by increasing the number of copies in the yeast genome through hybridization will combine desired industrial traits from the parental yeasts.