PhD & Postdoc

Luca Bianchi

Precision Fermentation · University of Padua

Luca Bianchi engineers the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to overproduce structured triacylglycerols with a high oleic acid content in the sn-2 position — a lipid architecture with applications in infant formula where sn-2 palmitate is the current gold standard but sn-2 oleate is emerging as preferable for specific therapeutic nutrition. Working under Prof. Eleonora Conti at the University of Padua's Department of Agronomy, Food, Natural Resources, Animals and Environment, Luca has combined flux balance analysis to identify overexpression targets in the fatty acid elongation and desaturation pathway, CRISPR-based promoter swapping to achieve modular expression tuning, and adaptive laboratory evolution in oleate-supplemented minimal medium to relieve growth inhibition. His best-performing strain achieves a lipid titre of 48 g/L in fed-batch 10 L bioreactor runs with an oleate-enriched structured lipid fraction exceeding 70% of total cellular fatty acids — a 2.9-fold improvement over the parental strain. GC-FID FAME profiling confirms that sn-2 positional selectivity is maintained. A formal industry collaboration with Roquette Frères's specialty lipid division provides process scale-up infrastructure and frames the research within a realistic European food-ingredient regulatory pathway.

Thesis Topic

Metabolic Engineering of Yarrowia lipolytica for High-Titre De Novo Production of Oleic Acid-Rich Structured Lipids

Transition Signals