Become Part of the Team
Join us
Are you passionate about engineering microbes and driving sustainable biotechnology forward? We’re always looking for talented and highly motivated researchers to join our team.
We welcome inquiries from motivated master’s students interested in doing their thesis work in our lab. PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are also encouraged to get in touch. There may be opportunities to apply for joint funding to support your research.
If you're interested in joining the Sustainable and Synthetic Metabolism Lab, please contact Sebastian Wenk to explore current possibilities.
Open roles
MSc. Projects in the SSM Lab
Project 1 — Engineering synthetic pathways for one-carbon assimilation
Can a cell be rewired to grow on CO₂-derived formate? We have shown that it can. Our lab recently demonstrated formate assimilation via the serine-threonine cycle, a synthetic route through which cells generate biomass from a one-carbon substrate. A functional pathway, however, is not a understood one. We are now dissecting the mechanistic basis of assimilation through this route and applying those insights to the design of improved serine cycle variants.
The project sits at the interface of metabolic engineering and microbial physiology: constructing and validating pathway variants, characterising growth phenotypes, and identifying the metabolic constraints that limit flux. Well suited to someone drawn to both rational design and mechanistic interrogation.
Techniques: strain engineering, molecular cloning, growth characterisation, metabolomics
Project 2 — Enzyme engineering through next-generation evolution
Natural evolution is slow and undirected. We make it fast and aimed. Using in vivo targeted mutagenesis systems such as MutaT7, we elevate the mutation rate of a single gene of interest far above the genomic background and couple the resulting diversity to selection in continuous culture. The result is a platform for converting a rate-limiting enzyme into one that is no longer the bottleneck.
Several projects are available within this line of work, depending on whether your interest lies in evolving a target enzyme or in advancing the mutagenesis and selection systems themselves.
Techniques: molecular cloning, selection strain design, continuous cultivation, NGS analysis
Project 3 — Multi-reactor strategies for expanding the reach of laboratory evolution
Adaptive laboratory evolution has enabled synthetic pathways that rational design alone could not deliver. It carries a structural limitation, however: under continuous selection, each substitution must confer an immediate advantage over the prevailing variant in order to be retained. Enzymes seldom improve one mutation at a time, and the beneficial combinations are frequently separated by intermediates of reduced fitness.
This project develops a multi-reactor evolution strategy designed to decouple diversification from selection. By separating mutagenesis and selection into distinct, connected culture vessels and controlling the exchange between them, the approach aims to sustain access to fitness-neutral and transiently deleterious intermediates while still enriching for superior variants. You would characterise the constraints of conventional ALE quantitatively, then establish and benchmark the multi-reactor regime against them.
The work combines evolutionary theory with substantial hands-on reactor operation, and suits someone motivated to understand why an approach works rather than only that it does.
Techniques: strain engineering, molecular cloning, bioreactor operation, in vivo targeted mutagenesis, NGS analysis
