With animal-free dairy products and vegetarian meat alternatives already available on the market, it's easy to see how biotechnology could transform the food industry. Advances in genetic engineering are allowing us to make use of microorganisms to provide cruelty-free products which are healthier for consumers and healthier for the environment.
One of essentially the most promising sources of revolutionary foods is fungi — a various kingdom of organisms that naturally produce a wide selection of palatable and nutritious proteins, fats, antioxidants and flavor molecules. Chef-turned-bioengineer Huao Hillmani, affiliated with the Biosciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is exploring the numerous possibilities of recent flavors and textures that could be created by modifying genes already present in Coke.
“I think it's a fundamental aspect of synthetic biology that we're taking advantage of organisms that have evolved to be really good at certain things,” said Hillmany, a bioengineering expert at UC Berkeley. is a postdoctoral researcher in Jay Kessling's lab. . “What we're trying to do is understand what the fungus is making and try to open it up and expand it. And I think that's an important angle to let us introduce genes from different species in the wild. No need. Re-investigating how we can stitch things together and unlock what's already there.”
In their recent paper, published March 14, Hill-Many and colleagues at UC Berkeley, the Joint Bioenergy Institute, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability studied a multicellular fungus referred to as koji mold. is known as, through which is used. East Asia for hundreds of years to ferment starch into sake, soy sauce, and miso. First, the team used CRISPR-Cas9 to develop a gene-editing system that could make everlasting and reproducible changes to the koji mold genome. Once they established a toolkit of modifications, they applied their system to create modifications that elevate mold as a food source. First, Hill-Many focused on increasing the mold's production of heme — an iron-based molecule present in many lifeforms but most abundant in animal tissue, which makes meat tender. It has a definite color and taste. (There's also the artificially produced plant-derived ham that offers the Impossible Burger its meat-soaking properties.) Next, the team increased the production of ergothioneine, an antioxidant found only in fungi. which is related to cardiovascular health advantages.
After these changes, the once white fungus turned red. With minimal preparation — draining off excess water and grinding — sliced ​​mushrooms could be patted, then fried into an attractive-looking burger.
Hill-Many's next goal is to make fungi much more attractive by tuning the genes that control the structure of the mold. So, we would have the opportunity to program the feel of lot fibers to supply a meat-like experience. And then we are able to take into consideration increasing the lipid composition for more mouthfeel and nutrition,” Hillmany said, who was a fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley during the study. “I'm really enthusiastic about how we are able to further have a look at the fungus and, you recognize, tinker with its structure and metabolism for food.”
Although this work is only the start of the journey to tap fungal genomes to create recent foods, it demonstrates the nice potential of those organisms to function sources of easily grown proteins that Avoid the complicated ingredient lists of existing meat substitutes. Cost constraints and technical difficulties hinder the production of cultured meat. Additionally, the team's gene-editing toolkit is a big step forward for the sphere of synthetic biology as an entire. Currently, a big number of biomanufactured goods are comprised of engineered bacteria and yeast, single-celled cousins ​​of mushrooms and molds. Yet despite an extended history of manufacturing fungi for direct consumption by humans or to provide staples comparable to copper, multicellular fungi haven’t yet been used to the identical extent as engineered cellular factories because their genomes are way more complex. , and so they have adaptations that make gene editing a challenge. . The CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit developed on this paper lays the muse for simple modification of the koji mold and lots of of its relatives.
“These organisms have been used to produce food for centuries, and they are incredibly efficient at converting carbon into a wide variety of complex molecules, including many that are brewers,” said Jay Kessling. It can be almost unimaginable to provide using a classical host like yeast or the like,” said Jay Kessling. Joe is a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and a professor at UC Berkeley. “By unlocking the koji mold through the event of those tools, we’re unlocking the potential of an enormous recent group of hosts that we are able to use to make foods, invaluable chemicals, energy-rich biofuels, and medicines. It's an exciting recent avenue for biomanufacturing.”
Drawing on his culinary background, Hill-Many strives to be certain that the following generation of fungus-based products will not be only delicious, but truly desirable to consumers, including those with sophisticated tastes. . In a separate study, he and Kessling teamed up with the chefs of Chemist, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen, to play with the purity potential of one other multicellular fungus, a fungus traditionally used to provide a staple food in Indonesia. is used for what is known as oncom. Fermenting waste products left over from making other foods, comparable to tofu. Fascinated by its ability to rework leftovers into protein-rich food, scientists and chefs studied fungi within the alchemist's test kitchen. They discovered that it produces and secretes many enzymes because it grows. When grown on starchy rice, the fungus produces an enzyme that liquefies the rice and makes it intensely sweet. “We developed a process to make a beautiful, brilliant orange porridge with just three ingredients — rice, water and fungus –,” Hillmany said. “It became a new dish on the tasting menu that uses fungal chemistry and color in a dessert. And I think what it really shows is the opportunity to bridge the laboratory and the kitchen.”
Hillmany's work on the gene editing research described in this text is supported by UC Berkeley's Miller Institute. Keasling's lab is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Both received additional support from the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. The Joint Bioenergy Institute is a DOE bioenergy research center managed by Berkeley Lab.