Post-Doctoral Fellow - Microbiology/Biotechnology

This is a 2-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship attached to a fully funded Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment Smart Ideas Grant, awarded to investigators at both the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology. The position will be based at the former.

Project summary
Providing suitable feeds for finfish aquaculture is a growing global challenge for humanity, especially given the rising economic and environmental costs of the capture fisheries required to supply the fish meal essential for growth of cultured fish. For example, the World Bank projects a 90% increase in the price of fish meal by 2030, while food fish aquaculture production is projected to grow from 47 to 93 million tonnes. Both of these statistics are of concern for the world's food supply. Intestinal microbes are now understood to be critical for health and nutrition in all animals, including humans, and we have studied these interactions in marine fish. Our Marsden-funded work on protein nutrition in wild seaweed-eating fish, including the commercial species butterfish, has shown (a) that microbes resident in the fish gut convert atmospheric nitrogen into microbial protein in the same way that root nodules of leguminous plants fix nitrogen into soils, and (b) that these microbial proteins are taken up by the fish and provide an important source of protein in addition to dietary seaweed. Our novel idea is to develop batch cultures of the microbial communities from the gut of these fish to produce finfish aquaculture feeds from waste seaweed that we know support growth in wild fish populations. This would circumvent (a) the economic and environmental costs of feeding capture fish to cultured fish, and (b) the problems of using terrestrial protein sources that can contain compounds that may interfere with digestion, and/or lack critical nutrients for growth of cultured fish.

Skills and Experience
The project will involve culturing hindgut microbiota from New Zealand marine herbivorous fishes, and will require experience in growing, handling, and isolating anaerobic bacteria. Expertise with handling batch and chemostat cultures would be very useful. Also helpful would be experience in analysing fermentation products by biochemical, chemical and gas chromatographic methods. 16S community profiling will also be involved, though we intend to get such profiling done by subcontract.