AWRI Scales Bioprospecting with PIXL

The Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI)

The AWRI has a clear mission: to help the wine industry make better wines.   

For Dr Anthony Borneman and his colleagues, that means not only studying Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the classic winemaking yeast, but also exploring “non-Saccharomyces” species – other yeasts and bacteria that can add nuance and complexity to wine styles.

The team’s work stretches from chemistry to microbiology, and includes adaptive evolution and traditional breeding. They also seek out new strains in the wild that might one day become indispensable to winemakers. In Dr Borneman’s words:

“We do a lot of bioprospecting. We look at what yeasts and bacteria are present, how they interact, and then try to tease them apart and find new strains.”

Among their incredibly varied research projects, the AWRI undertook a massive citizen science program called Yeast Catchers, working with over 3,300 school students across Australia to help collect and identify new yeast strains.

Speaking on the project, Dr Borneman said:

“Working with schoolchildren from around Australia, we sent off tubes of yeast-selective media – which they inoculated from gumnuts, leaves, flowers, anything! Then they sent them back to us. We plated them out and got different colonies.”

The Challenge: Exploring a forest of yeast

Bioprospecting is a numbers game. Among the forests of colonies on plates lie precious strains with desirable traits for fermentation. But finding them requires picking, isolating, and screening them at a scale no human team can sustain by hand.

During AWRI’s Yeast Catchers project, the children generated a vast library of environmental samples from across Australia. Each plate bloomed with yeast diversity, and to capture it, the team had to pick colonies in the tens of thousands.

Manual picking wasn’t viable. As Borneman put it, even the most skilled researcher would make critical errors or simply burn out when faced with the volume.

“People can make mistakes, and if you’re dealing with thousands of yeast colonies that look much the same, it’s very easy to miss one. That can cause a huge headache with such a large set of colonies.”

The Solution: Small robot, big impact

Several years earlier, the AWRI needed a colony picker that was precise, reliable, and practical for day-to-day use. While larger colony pickers existed, they were high-maintenance and overkill for the lab’s needs. When the PIXL was first showcased at SynBio, they knew it offered the right balance for their diverse bioprospecting needs.

“We planned on doing a lot of bioprospecting, and colony picking was a big part of that plan. Having a small, standalone, easy-to-use colony picker was ideal for what we were after.”

PIXL’s impact was critical to the success of the Yeast Catchers project. After receiving hundreds of samples from all around Australia, the AWRI team plated them out and turned PIXL loose.

“Using the PIXL, we picked tens of thousands of colonies – it would be impossible to do that by hand – and we ended up discovering hundreds of different yeast species from around Australia.”

In total, they obtained more than 6,000 yeast isolates representing 113 different species from across Australia. And, in sharing their findings with the children involved, they offered them a rare glimpse into the invisible microbial world all around us.

Outcomes: From plates to progress

So far, PIXL has enabled:

• Picking tens of thousands of yeast colonies with consistency and traceability.
• Discovery of hundreds of new yeast species through bioprospecting projects.
• Expansion of AWRI’s yeast library, now numbering close to 20,000 isolates.

Looking ahead, AWRI expects its PIXL to continue supporting core R&D and exploratory projects, pushing the boundaries of microbiology by freeing researchers from repetitive manual work to focus on analysis and innovation.