Establishing new fungal cell factories for the production of terpenoids and terpenoid-based materials

The project aims at developing new fungal cell factories to produce bioactive terpenoids and terpenoid polymers derived from mycorrhizal mushroom-forming fungi. Generally, these cannot be grown in the lab, thus harnessing their metabolites and understanding the underlying biosynthesis routes is impossible without the use of a heterologous host. Currently, the available hosts are phylogenetically distant from this group of mushroom-forming fungi, which makes heterologous gene expression and production of metabolites often unsuccessful. In this project, I will engineer a fungus that belongs to this group but that does grow in the lab, and I will develop synbio methods and tools to enable its application both as a discovery and a production platform.