Transformative microbiological inputs for innovative winemaking

Summary

Objective

This project aims to produce foundational yeast strains that bring together technical traits from a diversity of genetic backgrounds in addition to truly novel yeasts that can be used to produce natural flavourings for the wine industry. Such products will drive productivity improvements through refinements in performance traits of production yeasts and the provision of additive options to augment wine flavour. The project also aims to determine whether winery waste products (such as grape marc) could be used for the production of value-added compounds using engineered yeasts.

Background

Wine is the ultimate culmination of a plethora of complex biological processes. Accordingly, most inputs (even when excluding grape must) are biologically based and include commercial yeasts, bacteria and enzymes used in processing. Classically, the development of improved biological inputs has revolved around phenotypic selection, in which organisms with improved characteristics are specifically chosen for further use or as breeding stock. As selection relies on genetic variation, mutagenesis is often used to increase the pool of variation available. However, standard mutagenesis/selection is a random process, in which isolates with the required alteration must be identified from a background of thousands of strains. Classical strain development is therefore resource intensive, which ultimately limits the scope of research that can be undertaken. Recent developments in the life sciences have seen the emergence of new technologies that enable precision editing and engineering of plants, animals and microorganisms. The evolution of these technologies has been rapid, and innovation in this space is constant. While not occurring at the same pace as technical developments, changes to the regulatory landscape have nonetheless occurred with the result that opportunities for new wine microorganism development now present themselves. This project will investigate and apply a range of cutting-edge genome editing technologies, such as CRISPR-Cas9, to provide transformative microbiological inputs for the wine industry. Harnessing these techniques will allow the rapid and efficient development of new microorganisms, through the use of accelerated breeding to assemble (stack) existing traits that do not frequently co-exist. These non-GMO strains could be directly deployed into the wine industry under a non-GMO framework In addition, the project will explore the metabolic diversity afforded by the application of revolutionary synthetic biology techniques to deliver microbial tools that will future-proof the Australian wine industry should regulatory and social license barriers to the use of this technology within Australia be removed. These synthetic biology derived organisms can be endowed with entirely new traits (phenotypes), resulting from the introduction of regulatory circuits for control of gene expression or the addition of entirely new pathways enabling the production of new metabolites. As a whole, this project will explore the spectrum of possibilities provided by these new genome editing technologies within the framework of the developing, and anticipated, regulatory landscape.

This project builds on findings from previous research in AWRI 1701-3.2.1 (Putting microbial diversity to work in shaping wine style) and AWRI 1701-4.4.3 (Bioprospecting Australian microbial genetic diversity).