My name is Jakob Peder Pettersen and I am a PhD student at the Department of Biotechnology and Food Science at NTNU with Eivind Almaas as my main supervisor. I finished my master’s degree in biotechnology in January 2020 with a thesis on interactions between microbes in aquatic environments. During my time of study at NTNU in Trondheim, I have also studied statistics, providing me an advantage in data analysis.
I currently work on the ERAnet CoBioTech project CoolWine which aims to reduce the ethanol content of wine. This is an international project with partners in Spain, Germany, Sweden and Norway. The target for the project is that with aeration, yeasts will respire the sugars of the wine instead of fermenting it to ethanol. However, there are many challenges on the way such as the Crabtree effect (yeasts prefer fermentation even when oxygen present) and buildup of unwanted side-product (especially acetic acid). My responsibility in the project is to create and improve genome-scale metabolic models for Saccharomyces cerevistae and a range of non-Saccharomyces yeast strains. For this task, I will integrate proteomics and metabolomics data from our project partners. Combinations of various Flux Based Analysis (FBA) tools will be used such as community FBA, dynamic FBA and internally constrainted FBA. Based upon the models, Evolutionary Laboratory Evolution (ALE) experiments and yeast consortia will be designed for producing wine with a lowered alcohol content.
