SBIR Phase I: Mining microbial diversity to culture new categories of cheese and other sustainable foods

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是通过利用微生物多样性精心培育食品来建立一个更可持续的食品体系。越来越多的人意识到动物产品对环境和健康的危害，促使许多人寻求植物性食品，但这种寻找往往受到令人反胃的昂贵产品的限制。例如，奶酪是西方菜肴中最受欢迎的食物之一，但按重量计算，它的碳足迹大于鸡肉或猪肉，而且含有三分之二的人无法消化的乳糖。到目前为止，以植物为基础的奶酪未能达到与乳制品奶酪相关的浓郁口感。拟议中的项目将建立一个平台，用可持续的成分快速开发新型培养食品。拟议的项目将系统地挖掘微生物生物多样性，寻找可用于创造培养食品的新菌株。发明新的培养食品的一个关键技术障碍是缺乏描述复杂微生物群落和化学混合物的工具。使用微生物生态学和分析化学的高通量方法，这项工作寻求快速评估微生物创造令人信服的味道的潜力。这是一个迭代的过程，涉及鉴定、分离、优化和组合与生产高质量植物性奶酪的过程兼容的微生物菌株。主要目标是制作一种新的硬质陈年奶酪，以捕捉乳制品奶酪的复杂性和成瘾性，同时需要更少的自然资源。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to build a more sustainable food system by crafting cultured foods leveraging microbial diversity. Growing awareness of the environmental and health toll of animal products has persuaded many to seek plant-based foods, but the search is often curtailed by unappetizing and expensive products. For example, cheese is one of the best-loved foods in western cuisine, but by weight it has a carbon footprint larger than chicken or pork and contains lactose, which two-thirds of people cannot digest. To date, plant-based cheeses have failed to achieve anything similar to the rich depth of flavor associated with dairy cheeses. The proposed project will build a platform to rapidly develop novel cultured foods from sustainable ingredients. The proposed project will systematically mine microbial biodiversity for new strains usable in creating cultured foods. A key technical hurdle to inventing new cultured foods has been a lack of tools to profile complex microbial communities and chemical mixtures. Using high-throughput methods from microbial ecology and analytical chemistry, this work seeks to rapidly evaluate microbes for their potential to create compelling flavors. This is an iterative process involving the identification, isolation, optimization and combination of microbial strains that are compatible with to process of making high-quality, plant-based cheeses. The primary goals are to craft a new category of hard, aged cheeses that captures the complexity and addictiveness of dairy cheese, while requiring far fewer natural resources.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.