Yeast strain development, fermentations, biofuel production, microbiome-based solutions, co-fermentations.

For more than a century, the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology has been Israel’s primary technological university and the largest center of applied research in Israel. The Technion is currently the 2nd ranked university in Israel according to The Shanghai Ranking for 2022 placed Technion at 83rd out of universities around the world. Technion one of a handful of universities world-wide housing multiple Nobel-laureates simultaneously.
Technion is Israel’s biggest scientific-technologically university and one of the largest centers of applied research in the world. The future is being shaped at the Technion – with 12,500 Israel’s most dynamic students active in 18 departments. From Excellence in teaching to cutting-edge research, Technion offers more than 50 undergraduate programs and more than 60 graduate programs in engineering, science, medicine, architecture, education and management. Technion is Israel’s flagship of world-class education – bringing the small country of Israel its first Nobel prizes in science. It is also a vital center of national and international outreach – with a superb range of programs promoting science, technology and entrepreneurship for young people across the world.
The Technion encourages scientific participation at a national and international level. The Technion invest considerable resources to promoting women in science as well as the integration of minorities through equal opportunity programs. Technion footsteps are imprinted in collaborative scientific research and outreach projects worldwide, making it a powerhouse of collaborative thought, blending inspiration and expertise from across the disciplines, with numerous international conferences and symposia each year. Bridging the gap between science and society, the Technion run numerous courses in entrepreneurship, innovation and scientific communication. The Entrepreneurship Center at Technion sponsors many and varied activities designed to take advantage of Technion’s outstanding capabilities in innovative technologies and applications.

The Yechezkel Kashi’s lab (the applied genomics labs) at the Technion is active in several fields, applying microbial systems for beneficial purposes. Specifically, the lab expertise is centered in the following fields:
• Development of yeast strains and fermentation processes for production of biofuels (bioethanol and biodiesel) being sustainable energy sources. The lab is pioneering in yeast breeding, a powerful tool to improve traits in yeast with industrial relevance. This may be combined with conventional genetic engineering approaches for the development of superior yeast strains. Moreover, we are highly interested in using agriculture wastes as feedstocks for sustainable fermentation processes, offering the possibility to produce biofuels from these post-harvest wastes.
• Characterization of microbiome profiles of food products. The lab has developed a pipeline to monitor food safety and quality by tracking the microbial populations of the product. This may serve as an early warning tool to detect problematic food batches, minimizing the generation of food production wastes.
• Co-fermentations of yeast-bacteria consortia. Using computational modelling, we developed microbial consortia which may improve fermentations. Improvement may be translated to better production capacities or to better resistance to bacterial contaminations developed through fermentations of agriculture wastes.
The lab is looking for collaborations in any of these fields or other related-fields.

Biofuels, bioethanol, biodiesel, oleaginous yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, fermentations, co-fermentations, microbiome.