3 ms·
I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is
by elil17 4y ago
I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues:
1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them.
2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way to control the chirality of the proteins (50% will be poisonous mirror images of proteins, think thalidomide). Chiral sorting is still really hard.
3. It will taste nasty.
The article discusses 1 and 3 but 2 is an interesting one that I think doesn’t get much attention.
- cowtools 4y agoCould you use an enzyme to reliably produce chiral molecules? Maybe we will be able to mass-produce nano-machines or something that could facilitate this on an avogadro's scale.
- manwe150 4y agoLike your apropos username, I think what you are describing is basically a cow
- moralestapia 4y agoI used to be a biologist and worked a lot with bioreactors. 1 is absolutely true and on top of that, and also since this is meant to become food, you need to be extremely careful to make sure that none of your batches become contaminated by literally anything that lives in the surrounding air, water and all other inputs to the process. Plus, when you "scale" out your process (i.e. use a bigger bioreactor) these problems grow as much, there is no economy of scale here, quite the contrary the larger this gets the bigger the headaches. I guess they deserve the benefit of the doubt but I'm bearish on them succeeding. I really hope they prove me wrong, though!
- usrn 4y agoYou can go half way and just use micro organisms like algae. Those are very easy to keep alive, they really just need sun and CO2. Then you can use the sugars and lipids as feed stock for the next step.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoAlgae are not that easy to keep alive, unless you are skimming a wild pond, or harvesting kelp or something. At that point you might as well get your sugars from conventionally farmed plants.
- usrn 4y agoI grow it myself. Occasionally you have to replenish the nitrates and I keep it in a climate controlled area but other than that it takes pretty much no effort to keep alive.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago> keep it in a climate controlled area Try scaling that to 1km^2 and come back to me. And that's not even accounting for making modifications or algae husbandry to try to improve yields, which will cripple your algae ability to fend off things that want to eat it, etc.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoYou can't build proteins at that scale from amino acids (I used to make proteins from amino acids). There are absolutely ways to catalytically control chirality. See k Barry sharpless' Nobel prize, David macmillan proline catalysis, etc. Scale is still a problem. The mirror images of proteins are highly unlikely to be toxic in the way that thalidomide is.