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CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat
- theultdev 10mo agoWe've gone from GMOs are bad to lab meat being okay.
- Arch485 10mo agoWell, no, I know a lot of people who think lab meat is seriously NOT ok (these are the same people who think GMO corn will somehow kill you).
- theultdev 10mo agoMost comments here are pretty positive, other than noting it's not like meat. But nothing really about health aspects. I'm fine with GMOs, a lot of produce would be pretty inedible without it. It's a lot more natural then what we're doing here.
- SapporoChris 10mo agoThey'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.
- shrubble 10mo agoThere’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.
- truekonrads 10mo agoThis is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
- asterix_pano 10mo agoThat is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
- Certhas 10mo agoIf all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect. In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
- johanvts 10mo agoThats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
- tdb7893 10mo agoA negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is referencing how they are actually produced, which is generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of thousands to millions of birds a year).
- exe34 10mo agohow big is your backyard?
- swiftcoder 10mo agoBack of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time. That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
- 10mo ago
- buu700 10mo agoNeurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo agoI 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.
- Semaphor 10mo agoHave you tried dehydrated granules from 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit? It has no weird additional ingredients besides those two and for my wife and I has replaced ground beef except for burgers
- lukas099 10mo agoWhere do you even get that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
- Semaphor 10mo agoI get the brand Lotao, but they are German (also available in UK IIRC). Our drug store DM also has a house brand of it. I assumed that if there are 2, there are probably more elsewhere ;)
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo agoThis one? https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english
- Semaphor 10mo agoYeah that's the one, I have it on subscription, 1kg/2 months (about 3kg of finished product) But considering the simplicity of the product, I assume any brand will be very similar.
- tdeck 10mo agoI've tried pea protein products before that had a kind of bitter taste. What is the flavor profile like?
- ggm 10mo agoI 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.
- jcfrei 10mo agoThe farming lobby will try to ban it as soon as it becomes a viable alternative to poultry. I hope consumers will have the awareness to fight back.
- YurgenJurgensen 10mo agoThe feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
- Ericson2314 10mo agoFungus probably needs more much too, because no photosynthesis.
- lm28469 10mo ago> I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull. Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus. "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how, maintenance, &c.
- YurgenJurgensen 10mo agoFactory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on site though, so the real power isn’t in the chicken farmers, it’s the ones growing chicken feed, and they’re probably used to switching crops to suit market demands. And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than factory-farmed chicken, so they’re not the ones that vat-grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.
- zardo 10mo agoThey would probably prefer that their expertise and massive investments in infrastructure for raising chickens isn't made worthless.
- chasil 10mo agoI had vaguely remembered that chitin was equivalent to cellulose in our inability to digest. The article addresses it: "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 10mo ago> This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases. How?
- curtisf 10mo agoBy replacing (some) farmed meat with farmed fungi protein. Although it's theoretically possible for a disease to infect both fungus and animals, because the biology is so different, the risk is greatly, greatly reduced. In addition, it may be possible to reduce the use of treatments such as antibiotics which, in their currently mass application to farmed animals, could directly lead to the development of antibiotic resistant in diseases which affect humans and animals.
- brnt 10mo agoPlus, chucking the contents of a few biotanks in case of infection is a hell of a lot better than having to kill and waste millions of birds. I mean, industrial slaughter isn't a pretty process, even in better plants, which most aren't, but where they come to wipe out the barn, they're not putting animal welfare first.
- boxed 10mo agoAh, good point.
- aitchnyu 10mo agoFish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage. for humans, does shellfish allergy (tropomyosin and other proteins) diagnosis imply chitin allergy?
- VladVladikoff 10mo agoIf the goal is reduced CO2, wouldn’t it be better to take aim at plants, rather than fungi?
- kalessin 10mo agoWhy? I am not sure photosynthesis plays a large role in the lower carbon footprint.
- VladVladikoff 10mo agoFungi produce CO2 and sequester O2.
- otabdeveloper4 10mo ago> If the goal is reduced CO2 ... 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?
- ragequittah 10mo agoThe cow farts, the important forests being torn down far cattle, the important forests being torn down for soy beans that feed the cattle, the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised. The problem you dismissed is indeed far larger than the one you're worried about.
- mos87 10mo ago>the important forests being torn down far cattle It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle. >the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised Gosh, that's sad. One way to go about it is to vote with your hard-earned and only buy meat from the Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite happy on the photos then.
- 10mo ago
- notepad0x90 10mo agomeet 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.
- Vanit 10mo agoLike you said I think it's culture, particularly ones that are food oriented. It's gonna be hard to get buy-in if people think it's too weird.
- isodev 10mo ago> doesn't taste like any natural food Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.
- cwillu 10mo agoI have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.
- awestroke 10mo agoThe 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.
- b59831 10mo ago[dead]
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- EarlKing 10mo ago[flagged]
- SilentM68 10mo agoWhen I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
- Bad_Initialism 10mo agoThe association is undiminshed by their web server being down. Uh oh.
- brnt 10mo agoThat would make for a great spinoff: farm the infected for food!
- SilentM68 10mo agoIt seems that when the apocalypse finally arrives, I will skip the Michelin stars and go straight to nightmare cuisine. Soylent Green is People, too! Sighhh, Sol Roth ;)
- fithisux 10mo agoFor chickens you do not have to pay license fees for the CRISPR technology. This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological research institute.
- swiftcoder 10mo agoWe 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.
- anotherpaul 10mo agoThe paper linked in the article: https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-7799(25)00404-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0167779925004044%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-779...
- akoboldfrying 10mo ago"Pleasant taste; some monsterism."
- anotherpaul 10mo agoWhile 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.
- aydyn 10mo agoTechnically, 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.
- fsckboy 10mo ago>Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources. not in a meaningful way, no. the probability that a new mutation you want will occur is much much lower than the probability you can breed offspring without a gene that's already in the bloodline.
- viciousvoxel 10mo agoOnce a desirable sequence modification is identified through artificial means, what is often done in practice is to simply expose samples of the organism to UV until the desired sequence appears "naturally." The output of this process is not typically considered GMO, at least for regulatory purposes.
- ACCount37 10mo agoWhich you can do for knockouts, but not for the "splice in a new gene 400BP long".
- airstrike 10mo agoClassic belter fare
- rubyfan 10mo agoFut beltalowda
- anon84873628 10mo agoOr those living in the Caves of Steel!
- dbcooper 10mo agoA 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: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/publication/338461559_Fungal_Peroxygenases_A_Phylogenetically_Old_Superfamily_of_Heme_Enzymes_with_Promiscuity_for_Oxygen_Transfer_Reactions/links/5e1c56fa4585159aa4cbb474/Fungal-Peroxygenases-A-Phylogenetically-Old-Superfamily-of-Heme-Enzymes-with-Promiscuity-for-Oxygen-Transfer-Reactions.pdf#page=67 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...
- justonceokay 10mo agoThat’s do interesting. I never would have assumed that single-celled animals have significantly more nuclear material per-weight than meat.
- meindnoch 10mo agoFinally vegans can get gout too!
- globular-toast 10mo agoIt'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.
- walterlw 10mo agoI believe this is about the perceived switching cost for the masses who, in the US and Europe for example, are predominantly not vegetarian.
- _dark_matter_ 10mo agoI'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.
- globular-toast 10mo ago> Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? It's not a "neg", it's my opinion. I don't think you need to crave meat, you are just lacking the proper cuisine that would satisfy you completely. Try Gobi 65 and you'll never crave "spicy chicken wings" again. I feel like people go veggie by just removing meat from a cuisine that is centred around it. Imagine British food without meat: nothing and mash, nothing and chips, roast nothing... mmm... delicious. You need to completely change. There's nothing "missing" from a vegetarian Indian meal.
- pstuart 10mo agoAnother angle for sustainable protein: https://www.airprotein.com/ https://www.airprotein.com/ Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
- inkcapmushroom 10mo agoI wish they would just say what's producing the protein. "Our cultures" and talk of fermentation makes me think it's just yeast maybe?
- pstuart 10mo agoYeah, considering the age of the project that inspired it, yeast would be a good bet. Hopefully they do well and we learn more about it; we need all the options we can get to feed the planet in a sustainable manner.
- cregy 10mo agoThis! 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!
- lm28469 10mo ago> 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
- rapatel0 10mo agoI have a feeling this will be solved somehow with peptides in the long run
- ericmcer 10mo agoWe 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.
- stubish 10mo agoIt all burned out because the market for 'fake meat' is tiny, the meat loving ethical or ignorant vegetarians. The vast bulk of the vegetarian market would prefer a lentil burger. In the real market for 'fake meat', it needs to compete economically with factory chicken, which is one of the cheapest protein sources on the planet.
- vintermann 10mo agoThis product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is really targeted at.
- literalAardvark 10mo agoNot necessarily. 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.
- padjo 10mo agoI’ve seen very little that isn’t just correlation of highly processed food consumption and generally poor lifestyle
- literalAardvark 10mo agoHere, this is a solid intro you can thread out of at your leisure. There's really no controversy around this at a scientific level, only on social media: https://www.thelancet.com/series-do/ultra-processed-food https://www.thelancet.com/series-do/ultra-processed-food
- padjo 10mo agoI think my counter position is well explained here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916523036845?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652... Edit to add: I think it’s also clear from this that there isn’t anything like the scientific consensus you believe there is on this issue.
- literalAardvark 10mo agoThat paper unequivocally states in the beginning that the authors aren't trying to contradict that food processing affects health outcomes, they're just dissatisfied with the low quality of the classification system. So there's no debate that ultra processed foods affect health, there's only debate on whether the category itself is good enough. And if you go deeper into the subject, it becomes pretty obvious that the Nova system is a pretty bad model. But it's a simple model that can be easily communicated to Doomscroll Sally. The better models we have haven't caught on anywhere near as well. "The participants in this debate agree that food processing vitally affects human health, and that the extent of food processing significantly affects diet quality and health outcomes. They disagree on the significance of ultra-processing, as defined within the Nova food classification system."
- metalman 10mo ago"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.
- westmeal 10mo agoProbably 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.
- imzadi 10mo agoHen of the woods has like 1 gram of protein per cup. The point of this one is that it has more protein.
- machomaster 10mo agoIt would be better to give an understandable measurement weight per weight (percentage) instead of the weight per football field type of weirdness.
- metalman 10mo agoAh!, though the hen of the woods must be all carbs then, as it didn't leave me hungry and, it occurs to me that in certain tests, fungus might be smarter than chickens, something something, maze/logic tests of mycelium.
- torginus 10mo agoThis 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.
- andrelaszlo 10mo agoQuorn is based on fungus. I'm not a huge fan of it myself but it's sold across the EU, and it's in almost all stores where I live.
- NoGravitas 10mo agoQuorn is fine, but it's neither better nor cheaper than the plant-based fake chicken nuggets, so I'm not super enthusiastic about it.
- ITniggah 10mo ago[flagged]
- wartywhoa23 10mo agoNo, thank you.
- sgt 10mo agoMmmm, nothing like a crispy fungus burger!
- NoGravitas 10mo agoI enjoy a grilled portobello cap now and then.
- fuzzy_biscuit 10mo agoDo we live in The Expanse universe now?
- bawana 10mo agoI 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
- dan_hawkins 10mo agoLike pineapple?
- djaouen 10mo agoSoon, humanity will have zero excuse to kill any animal. Neat!
- Y_Y 10mo agoWho 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.
- eudamoniac 10mo agoI feel that eating meat is unethical yet I make no attempt to reduce my consumption; I just acknowledge I am behaving unethically in this regard. Do you think that is such a minority position?
- Y_Y 10mo agoIt's just you and me I'm afraid.
- Bender 10mo agoFungus 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.
- Rooster61 10mo agoWe're only massacring the fruiting bodies. The mycelium is just fine and lives on to create even more fruiting bodies. It's like picking apples from an apple tree. The tree itself isn't harmed in the slightest. The only difference is that many fruits are designed to be eaten so that the seeds can pass an germinate, whereas mushrooms achieve this through spore release.
- b800h 10mo agoYou could make a substitute that mimicked meat entirely. I'd still take the thing that grew in a cow. In "Culture" terms, I'm with the Affront. :-)
- lillecarl 10mo agoDo you prefer huge wasteful trucks and wide roads too?
- NoGravitas 10mo agoI think that is implied.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- vzaliva 10mo agoI’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.
- goda90 10mo agoI 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
- api 10mo agoThis would be outstanding for organic recycling in space.
- joshuamcginnis 10mo agoFYI, the fungus Fusarium venenatum has been used for decades to produce vegan protein by companies like Quorn. https://www.quorn.us/ https://www.quorn.us/
- cboyardee 10mo ago[dead]
- docmars 10mo agoI 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.
- Jeff_Brown 10mo agoWhat's the protein density? For ordinary mushrooms it's around 2.5% by weight, vs. around 27% for beef.