Dyadic is currently at an advanced stage of development of its C1 High-Throughput Robotic Screening (HTRS) system. This technology is the only system that utilizes a fungal host for functional expression. Fungal hosts have distinguishing advantages over other systems.

Bacteria, while amenable to high-throughput screening, are unable to express eukaryotic genes efficiently, due to their inability to splice introns or glycosylate gene products. (More at Biodiversity Access.)

Although yeasts are eukaryotes, introns are not efficiently spliced. Furthermore, yeast are prone to hyperglycosylation, meaning gene products from yeast contain large numbers of mannose and other sugar residues not generally observed in proteins from humans and other mammals.

Filamentous fungi typically grow in long filaments that can become entangled during growth. As a result, growing these fungi in liquid cultures often results in high viscosity or impenetrable surface mats.

Dyadic’s C1, however, is able to overcome all of the above limitations. Unlike bacteria and yeast, C1 will efficiently splice introns. In addition, data indicate that glycosylation in C1 is very similar to that observed in mammals.

Further, the C1 strain used for screening has a distinct morphology compared to other filamentous fungi. While the C1 fungal strain isolated from the wild was filamentous, evolution in the laboratory led to a strain with a distinctly nonfilamentous morphology. This results in growth properties characterized by low viscosity and a lack of matting, allowing C1 to be cultivated in the low-volume cultures necessary to conduct HTRS.

During growth, C1 cultures grow in distinct propagules that are essentially unicellular. This allows for the transfer of individual "cells" to the wells of multiwell microtiter culture dishes - steps that are necessary for robotic screening. This is also essential for the separation and analysis of individual clones for the high-throughput screening process.

Only C1 has this unique combination of properties that make it the system of choice for gene discovery covering the entire spectrum of biodiversity.