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posted by CoolHand on Friday April 17 2015, @01:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-the-hippies-happy dept.

Wired has a profile of "Real Vegan Cheese", a product emerging from Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, California. The DIY/biotech lab is using genetically modified yeast cells to produce 11 proteins normally found in cow's milk, which can then be used to create synthetic cheese.

The genetic engineering approach to cheese has been enabled by the rapidly falling cost of DNA synthesis. It now costs less than $0.25 per base pair to obtain a custom DNA sequence which can be delivered by mail. Why make vegan cheese using yeast? Cheesemaking is an artisanal process with centuries of history and one of the earliest examples of human-directed microbiology. Existing plant-based vegan cheeses can't reproduce the casein proteins needed to achieve a passable cheese. However, Real Vegan Cheese will not use animal fat or lactose.

The process is not limited to bovine cheese:

When I visit the lab, I discover the cheese team includes a biologist, a bioethicist, a retired clinical psychologist, an accountant, and a former Apple marketer. "This to me is a natural extension of computer culture," says Maria Chavez, the ex-Apple employee and a leader of the vegan cheese project. "What is bigger to hack than our bodies and our environment? It's one of the last big frontiers. The possibilities are exciting."

The possibilities include not just vegan cow cheese, but, well, vegan human cheese. The same basic process for synthesizing cow's milk applies to milk from any other mammal. You just need different genes. Cheese made from engineered human breast milk may not sound like a top seller at the deli counter. But the team says it can serve a practical purpose: Human milk cheese could offer an option to people who have allergies to non-human dairy products. (Chavez said the group has put its experiments with human milk on hold due to Food and Drug Administration concerns about possible autoimmune reactions.)

The team is also attempting to create a narwhal cheese, after achieving the stretch goal on Indiegogo. The recipe and experiments involved will be released as "open source"; the DNA sequence(s) will be submitted to iGEM's Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

Critics of synthetic foods worry about the use of GMOs and the lightly regulated nature of biotechnology labs and hackerspaces. The Real Vegan Cheese team notes that the cheese itself isn't a GMO, only the yeast is. Other recent forays into synthetic food include Muufri's synthetic milk, and Evolva's vanilla/vanillin and saffron substitutes.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 18 2015, @02:04PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 18 2015, @02:04PM (#172406) Journal

    If one can identify chemical composition with precision. Then one could compare on a molecular composition of real cheese with GMO yeast produced cheese and complement any missing molecules.

    I'll see a problem with all synthetic production using mixing rather than produced by actual cells GMO or not. Because the synthetic will have no real on a molecular level regulation of production. And errors will occur as a percentage. Those parts may cause some real problems.

    If biochemistry were mastered. We would have artificial hearts and lungs that works long term already.

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 18 2015, @11:43PM

    by Reziac (2489) on Saturday April 18 2015, @11:43PM (#172638) Homepage

    I would never trust a vegan product to be nutritionally equivalent, even if our understanding of biochemistry was perfect.

    Since veganism is by design a recipe for human extinction, my suspicious little voice reminds me that if more people can be suckered into a vegan diet, that's more people who won't reproduce.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 19 2015, @12:16AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 19 2015, @12:16AM (#172656) Journal

      It's usually people that is largely beneficial to society that won't reproduce (enough) while others seems to have nothing better to do. Don't think veganism is very reproductively prohibitive.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday April 19 2015, @12:20AM

        by Reziac (2489) on Sunday April 19 2015, @12:20AM (#172660) Homepage

        Well, it is for vegans, and that's one group of ...misguided... folks we don't need more of.

        But, yeah, overall the reproductive pyramid seems upsidedown, til you remember that natural selection doesn't bother to listen to our ideas.

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.