PhD fellowship/scholarship SWEET Transporters as Regulators of Carbon Allocation and Drought Resilience in Tomato

Research area and project description:
Ensuring crop productivity under climate change is a major challenge, with drought posing one of the most severe threats to agricultural yield. While much attention has focused on photosynthesis, drought also disrupts the allocation of carbon from source leaves to reproductive organs, often limiting yield before photosynthesis itself, is strongly affected.

This PhD project will investigate how SWEET (Sugars Will Eventually be Exported Transporters) regulate carbon partitioning in tomatoes under drought conditions. SWEET transporters mediate sucrose efflux and play a central role in phloem loading and unloading, thereby controlling the distribution of sugars between vegetative and reproductive tissues. Their dynamic regulation under stress suggests that they are key determinants of how plants balance growth and survival during water deficit.

The overall aim is to identify SWEET transporters that control carbon allocation to fruits under drought and assess whether targeted manipulation of their expression can sustain yield. The project will combine plant physiology, molecular biology, and functional genomics approaches. Specifically, the project will:

(i) quantify drought-induced changes in carbon assimilation, export, and partitioning using physiological, biochemical and metabolic analyses;

(ii) identify drought-responsive SWEET genes and evaluate natural variation across tomato genotypes;

(iii) functionally characterise candidate genes using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing.

By linking molecular mechanisms of sugar transport with whole-plant physiology, this project will generate fundamental insights into source–sink regulation and provide new strategies for improving drought resilience in tomato and other fruit crops.

Project description: For technical reasons, you must upload a project description. Please simply copy the project description above and upload it as a PDF in the application.

Qualifications and specific competences:
Applicants to the PhD position must have master’s degree (or equivalent) in plant biology, plant physiology, molecular biology, biochemistry, or a related field.

Further requirements:

• Solid theoretical background in plant physiology and/or molecular biology
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Good communication skills in English (written and oral)
• Ability to work both independently and as part of a collaborative research team
• Technical skills (expected or advantageous)

Candidates should ideally have experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Molecular biology techniques (e.g. RNA extraction, qPCR)
• Plant physiology measurements (e.g. gas exchange, chlorophyll fluorescence)
• Plant growth and phenotyping under controlled conditions (greenhouse or growth chambers)
• Basic data analysis and statistics (R or similar)

The following will be considered strong advantages:

• Experience with CRISPR/Cas9 or plant transformation
• Transcriptomics and RNA-seq data analysis
• Enzymatic assays
• Metabolite or carbohydrate profiling
• Experience working with crop species

Place of employment and place of work:
The place of employment is Aarhus University, and the place of work is Department of Food Science, Agro Food Park 48, 8200 Aarhus N., Denmark.

Contacts:
Applicants seeking further information regarding the PhD position are invited to contact: 

• Antonios Petridis, apetridis@food.au.dk (main supervisor)
• Ana Lobo, alobo@food.au.dk (co-supervisor)

For information about application requirements and mandatory attachments, please see our application guide. If answers cannot be found there, please contact:

• admission.gradschool.tech@au.dk 

How to apply:
Please follow this link to submit your application. 

Application deadline is 08 July 2026 at 23:59 CEST. 

Preferred starting date is 01 September 2026.

Please note: 

• Only documents received prior to the application deadline will be evaluated. Thus, documents sent after deadline will not be considered.
• The programme committee may request further information or invite the applicant to attend an interview.
• Shortlisting will be used, which means that the evaluation committee only will evaluate the most relevant applications.