RESEARCHERS >
KYRIA BOUNDY-MILLS, Ph.D.
Curator, Phaff Yeast Culture Collection,
University of California, Davis

Address:
Department of Food Science
University of California Davis
One Shields Ave
Davis, CA, USA
95616

Contact:
Phone: 530.754.5575
Fax: 530.752.4759
E-mail: klbmills@ucdavis.edu

Link to a website:
www.phaffcollection.org

Research Areas:
1) Yeast ecology.
2) Insect-yeast associations: preferential cultivation of yeasts by Drosophila adults and larvae.
3) NIH-funded bioprospecting project: Isolation of microbes (bacteria, yeasts and molds) from several habitats, including the guts of wood-feeding insects collected from a remote region in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The microbes will be screened for novel cellulase activity, and will also identify microbes with high lipid content that could be useful as novel sources of biodiesel.

The Phaff Yeast Culture Collection at the University of California, Davis is one of the largest collections of wild yeasts in the world. Dr. Boundy-Mills distributes yeast cultures to academic and industrial researchers for use in a broad variety of applications such as production of valuable metabolites or enzymes, taxonomy, and ecology studies. Dr. Boundy-Mills performs contract screening on behalf of biotechnology companies, searching the collection for strains with high stress tolerance, strains that express enzymatic activity, or that produce valuable compounds such as alcohols or organic acids. This year, Dr. Boundy-Mills placed a representative subset of about 2,000 cultures in a microtiter plate format to facilitate future screening projects.