A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
There are better alternatives than consuming the whole cells.
There have been other attempts to use genetically-modified fungi (Trichoderma) for protein production, where they secrete in the cultivation medium a water-soluble animal protein, e.g. a cow whey protein or chicken egg white protein.
Then, through filtration and ultrafiltration, the desired protein is separated from the fungal cells and the cultivation medium, producing a protein powder in the same way how one makes whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
If done correctly this method produces only healthy protein without contaminants.
However, searching right now online if there has been any progress with this, I see that against a startup company that has already produced such whey protein powder from a fungal culture there is a lawsuit that alleges that they have not separated properly the whey protein and that what they have sold contained more fungal protein of uncertain quality and safety than the good whey protein that they claimed to sell.
Even if that company might be guilty of trying to exploit the technology before being perfected, the principle is sound and there is no doubt that this can be done, producing pure high-quality protein.
I actually use whey protein concentrate to provide a significant fraction of my protein consumption, so I hope that its production from fungi will succeed in a not too distant future.
Trichoderma is among the fungi that secrete enzymes in their environment, so the genetic modification that replaced its enzyme with whey protein or egg albumin is much simpler than the many modifications described in the parent article in order to make the whole cells more palatable, without really achieving this.
For producing a protein powder that can be used as an ingredient in cooking food from vegetable sources, the approach used with Trichoderma is sufficient. The techniques used in the parent article are justified because they do not want to make a healthy food, but they want to make a meat imitation. For myself, enhancing the quality of vegetable food is a much more important goal than attempting to simulate meat, but at least in USA it is likely that the second goal might make more money.
They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn utilizes in its products.
"The production process of gene-edited MP is more environmentally friendly than chicken meat and cell-cultured meat."
That's good news, if they get to the point where it is more economically friendly than chicken meat it will be great news.
I would love to eat meat free alternatives. Quorn gives me IBS. Same with the highly processed meat free "meat".
Beans are my basic goto for protein plus eggs.
I was coming to write about Quorn. I wondered if it was in the family because Quorn is an industrialised bioreactor process. This should translate over, unless weakened cell walls make for a process unfriendly change.
There’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.
While the paper is behind a pay wall, the abstract highlights that they used knock out gene editing, meaning this is not a GMO of the old days, with trans genes, but a mkdifcation one could have achieved with classical breeding if given enough time and resources.
If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources. Thats what evolution is afterall. Using CRISPR but not labelling it as genetically modified seems pretty wild, but then again EU does have some funky regulations.
I’m vegetarian. The "tastes like meat" claim is misleading. The main issue isn't the taste, it's the texture. Impossible Burger came close. Most mushroom-based substitutes I’ve tried are nothing like it.
I eat meat. I tried some Quorn turkey the other day and it was surprisingly like turkey. Not perfect but better experience than a poorly done dry turkey breast
Any 'fad blitz' you see is just mindless flailing, trying to deal with a category of food we know is unhealthy but are still trying to work out the mechanisms and reasons why (which would enable improved categorizations). It doesn't seem particularly targeted at anything, and most industry players profit from ultra processed foods. I think the interesting edge case is soy milk and similar. Most brands including organic ones count as ultra processed by the nutritionists definition, with vitamins and calcium supplementation. And this very supplementation is how many vegans and vegetarians keep their calcium and B vitamin levels up, even if they don't always realize it.
It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.
"Chicken of the woods", Hen of the woods?, whatever, shelf fungus, grows on dieing hardwoods, often in huge quantities, cooks like chicken, looks like chicken, tastes like chicken, but costs more unless you can gather it yourself.It also lasts for weeks on top of the fridge, but there must be ways to keep it longer.
Probably tastes better than this stuff. My mother is super into mushroom foraging and made some for me with garlic and some herbal salt and while I don't think it tastes quite like chicken, it's definitely pretty damn good.
I am never going to stop eating beef or poultry, no matter what any scientist or politician thinks about sustainability.
We have been using these as healthy, nutritious food sources for eons. I'm fine with people creating alternatives and making them available, but far too many people want to see the former disappear because they're misled by bad science and hysteria.
We already have licensing fees for GMO seeds. Can't be all that long before they CRISPR an actual chicken breed, and start charging licensing fees for those as well.
This sounds like they took a product that failed in the market - fungus based meat substitutes, and hinted at some superscience magic thats years from coming out, and that's if it proves safe, economical and a genunie improvement.
This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
This! Would love if we spent some of that sweet AI money into engineered new food sources. I've been watching Soylent for a while now. Food that can be made in space is what we need for interplanetary travel. Qudos to this crispr research!
> Food that can be made in space is what we need for interplanetary travel.
Given how fucked up astronauts who spends just a few month in space come back to earth I think we have dozens if not hundreds of other things to solve before even considering food. Your bones, muscles, eyes, circulatory system, &c. are not made for anything other than good ol earth
We had a pretty huge "fake meat" funding craze in 2021. Beyond meat traded at >$200 for a bit, now it is $1. Not sure why it all burned out and disappeared.
meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
There are plenty of "synthetic" flavours - Takis, Twinkies, and bubblegum drinks spring to mind.
There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
The taste/texture of jello is just collagen (roughly, "meat stew flavor"), fruit juice, and (tons of) sugar. It’s just an extremely heightened version of natural flavors. There is nothing new under the sun.
Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
You may be interested in the biotech startup Oobli <https://oobli.com/>. They're attempting to commercialize a protein-based sweetener, where the protein itself is interacting with your taste receptors and registering as 'sweet'.
The technology is based on some naturally occurring proteins from fruit native to West Africa, but I'd say the idea of sweet things that are good for you is pretty novel!
I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
I'd argue that Jell-o tastes good because sugar tastes good and that it's just the novel texture coupled with sweetness that is the attraction. I doubt many people know what unsweetened gelatin tastes like or if that even tastes good.
No, because if you're directly eating whatever is being grown, the carbon is in a closed cycle. (Feedstock -> Your food -> You -> Air you exhale -> Plants turn it into feedstock.)
CO2 is not really a 'sustainability' problem for food production, because food production and consumption is steady state.[1] Methane is somewhat of a problem (Because it's a potent greenhouse gas that is not part of the food chain, but does eventually break down), but also eventually reaches a steady state, where you add emit it as quickly as it breaks down.
The bigger sustainability problem for food production comes from non-steady-state, non-reversible actions. Burning down a rainforest to permanently turn it into pasture[1]. Overfarming a plot of land, and exhausting all the nutrients from it.
----
[1] Using fossil-fuel diesel-powered machinery to grow, harvest, and transport food, however, is not steady-state. That is a sustainability issue for food production. Fortunately, it's a very small part of overall human GHG emissions.
[2] Do enough of that, and this is irreversible - you can't ever turn that pasture back into rainforest, because you need existing rainforest to bootstrap new rainforest.
Fungus is very much alive and to meet peoples caloric requirements means massacring hundreds of trillions of them. We just can't easily hear them scream. They communicate with one another over massive fungal networks in forests and jungles. Fungus are fascinating. They can recognize patterns and make decisions. Slime mold is even more interesting in that it can remember complex patterns, solve mapping challenges and make decisions without a nervous system suggesting our understanding of the term life is likely very incomplete. Slime mold can remember feeding times and locations.
Who needs an excuse? You might think it's immoral, but that's a minority position and developing new fungi is going to be much easier than convincing billions of people to adopt your values.
I cant wait to see the unintended consequences. Imagine eating a food which then digests you from the inside out. Wait, wasnt there a video game like this?..,,,half-life
It's so odd to me as a veggie that people want something that "tastes like meat". If you've been immersed in decent veggie food for a while this isn't something you crave. Why would I want to eat a bit of dead animal? It's something I might do in a survival situation in a barren place, like Han Solo or something, but not if there are fresh veggies to hand.
If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should, then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of flavour.
But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so this is a good thing, I guess.
Not just vegetables, also hash browns, fried potatoes, french fries, pancakes, spaghetti, etc.
There are plenty of vegetarian meals (or vegan ones, though that's harder). It's just that we have relegated most of them to side dishes, entres or breakfast because meat is too popular as a main dish. But this is a very recent phenomenon
But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
I'm sorry, I've been vegetarian (mostly vegan, no eggs or milk) for over 10 years, and I crave meat. A juicy burger. Spicy chicken wings. Actually those are mainly it.
I am so thankful of advances that let me eat something my brain enjoys. I get the best of both worlds - no animal harmed in the process.
Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? I hate that. To each their own. I encourage everyone to be vegetarian to support animal rights, but I also would never tell them that their cravings aren't real or how to go about doing it.
I want umami and a meatlike texture sometimes. Beans and mushrooms are usually fine for this, and seitan is pretty good for texture, but a nice slab of textured mushroom protein would be great. I don't really care if it tastes like animal flesh or not, but having the texture would be great.
dbcooper|2 months ago
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...
adrian_b|2 months ago
There have been other attempts to use genetically-modified fungi (Trichoderma) for protein production, where they secrete in the cultivation medium a water-soluble animal protein, e.g. a cow whey protein or chicken egg white protein.
Then, through filtration and ultrafiltration, the desired protein is separated from the fungal cells and the cultivation medium, producing a protein powder in the same way how one makes whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
If done correctly this method produces only healthy protein without contaminants.
However, searching right now online if there has been any progress with this, I see that against a startup company that has already produced such whey protein powder from a fungal culture there is a lawsuit that alleges that they have not separated properly the whey protein and that what they have sold contained more fungal protein of uncertain quality and safety than the good whey protein that they claimed to sell.
Even if that company might be guilty of trying to exploit the technology before being perfected, the principle is sound and there is no doubt that this can be done, producing pure high-quality protein.
I actually use whey protein concentrate to provide a significant fraction of my protein consumption, so I hope that its production from fungi will succeed in a not too distant future.
Trichoderma is among the fungi that secrete enzymes in their environment, so the genetic modification that replaced its enzyme with whey protein or egg albumin is much simpler than the many modifications described in the parent article in order to make the whole cells more palatable, without really achieving this.
For producing a protein powder that can be used as an ingredient in cooking food from vegetable sources, the approach used with Trichoderma is sufficient. The techniques used in the parent article are justified because they do not want to make a healthy food, but they want to make a meat imitation. For myself, enhancing the quality of vegetable food is a much more important goal than attempting to simulate meat, but at least in USA it is likely that the second goal might make more money.
meindnoch|2 months ago
gsf_emergency_6|2 months ago
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...
justonceokay|2 months ago
SapporoChris|2 months ago
jcfrei|2 months ago
Flere-Imsaho|2 months ago
ggm|2 months ago
buu700|2 months ago
shrubble|2 months ago
anotherpaul|2 months ago
If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
aydyn|2 months ago
vzaliva|2 months ago
goda90|2 months ago
chasil|2 months ago
"The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase, resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."
This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
boxed|2 months ago
How?
aitchnyu|2 months ago
for humans, does shellfish allergy (tropomyosin and other proteins) diagnosis imply chitin allergy?
vintermann|2 months ago
stubish|2 months ago
literalAardvark|2 months ago
It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.
metalman|2 months ago
westmeal|2 months ago
imzadi|2 months ago
airstrike|2 months ago
anon84873628|2 months ago
rubyfan|2 months ago
anotherpaul|2 months ago
joshuamcginnis|2 months ago
https://www.quorn.us/
docmars|2 months ago
We have been using these as healthy, nutritious food sources for eons. I'm fine with people creating alternatives and making them available, but far too many people want to see the former disappear because they're misled by bad science and hysteria.
fithisux|2 months ago
This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological research institute.
swiftcoder|2 months ago
torginus|2 months ago
This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
andrelaszlo|2 months ago
cregy|2 months ago
lm28469|2 months ago
Given how fucked up astronauts who spends just a few month in space come back to earth I think we have dozens if not hundreds of other things to solve before even considering food. Your bones, muscles, eyes, circulatory system, &c. are not made for anything other than good ol earth
ericmcer|2 months ago
Jeff_Brown|2 months ago
notepad0x90|2 months ago
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
awestroke|2 months ago
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
edent|2 months ago
There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
bcoates|2 months ago
dkbrk|2 months ago
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
sp4nner|2 months ago
The technology is based on some naturally occurring proteins from fruit native to West Africa, but I'd say the idea of sweet things that are good for you is pretty novel!
Certhas|2 months ago
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
aydyn|2 months ago
Vanit|2 months ago
h-c-c|2 months ago
isodev|2 months ago
Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.
pstuart|2 months ago
Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
inkcapmushroom|2 months ago
SilentM68|2 months ago
Bad_Initialism|2 months ago
brnt|2 months ago
api|2 months ago
theultdev|2 months ago
Arch485|2 months ago
fuzzy_biscuit|2 months ago
VladVladikoff|2 months ago
vkou|2 months ago
CO2 is not really a 'sustainability' problem for food production, because food production and consumption is steady state.[1] Methane is somewhat of a problem (Because it's a potent greenhouse gas that is not part of the food chain, but does eventually break down), but also eventually reaches a steady state, where you add emit it as quickly as it breaks down.
The bigger sustainability problem for food production comes from non-steady-state, non-reversible actions. Burning down a rainforest to permanently turn it into pasture[1]. Overfarming a plot of land, and exhausting all the nutrients from it.
----
[1] Using fossil-fuel diesel-powered machinery to grow, harvest, and transport food, however, is not steady-state. That is a sustainability issue for food production. Fortunately, it's a very small part of overall human GHG emissions.
[2] Do enough of that, and this is irreversible - you can't ever turn that pasture back into rainforest, because you need existing rainforest to bootstrap new rainforest.
kalessin|2 months ago
otabdeveloper4|2 months ago
... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.
Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
sgt|2 months ago
NoGravitas|2 months ago
wartywhoa23|2 months ago
akoboldfrying|2 months ago
NedF|2 months ago
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b59831|2 months ago
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cboyardee|2 months ago
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EarlKing|2 months ago
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ITniggah|2 months ago
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djaouen|2 months ago
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lillecarl|2 months ago
bawana|2 months ago
dan_hawkins|2 months ago
globular-toast|2 months ago
If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should, then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of flavour.
But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so this is a good thing, I guess.
wongarsu|2 months ago
There are plenty of vegetarian meals (or vegan ones, though that's harder). It's just that we have relegated most of them to side dishes, entres or breakfast because meat is too popular as a main dish. But this is a very recent phenomenon
But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
_dark_matter_|2 months ago
I am so thankful of advances that let me eat something my brain enjoys. I get the best of both worlds - no animal harmed in the process.
Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? I hate that. To each their own. I encourage everyone to be vegetarian to support animal rights, but I also would never tell them that their cravings aren't real or how to go about doing it.
walterlw|2 months ago
NoGravitas|2 months ago