Precision fermentation alternative to palm oil

棕榈油无处不在。它存在于食品、化妆品和生物燃料领域。我们超市50%的产品都含有这种成分。棕榈油在植物油市场上独树一帜；它入口即化，非常适合烹饪，是一种高产作物。然而，棕榈油是最大的碳排放源之一，因为热带雨林和泥炭地的流失为种植园让路——1900万公顷的热带土地产生了超过5亿吨的二氧化碳当量，占全球排放量的1%。它造成了包括猩猩和马来熊在内的栖息地的严重丧失，而且小农的产品往往得不到公平的价格。英国政府承诺到2050年实现净零排放；英国20%的排放来自农业和食物链，如果我们要达到这些目标，就必须解决这些问题。太阳熊生物公司正在使用精密发酵技术大规模生产棕榈油的替代品。我们正在优化一种天然产油酵母菌株，以快速有效地从食物垃圾中生产油。我们的工艺每生产一公斤棕榈油可节省超过4公斤的二氧化碳和2000平方米的土地，这两种情况都节省了80%。我们的项目是使我们目前的菌株和工艺为500l规模的生产做好准备。这将包括改进我们的菌株和试验生物反应器和原料处理。这建立在我们作为快速启动奖的一部分进行的工作的基础上，项目10045430“用于精确发酵油的替代原料”，这使我们能够证明我们的酵母菌株中用于淀粉代谢的关键酶的表达。

Palm oil is everywhere. It's in food, cosmetics and biofuels. It's in 50% of our supermarket products. Palm oil is unique in the vegetable oil market; it melts in your mouth, is great for cooking and is a high-yielding crop. However, palm oil is one of the biggest carbon emitters due to loss of tropical rainforest and peatland to make way for plantations - it contributes over 500 million tonnes of CO2e, \>1% global emissions, from 19 million hectares of tropical land. It has caused significant habitat loss, including for the Orangutan and Sun Bear, and all too often the smallholders do not receive a fair price for their produce.The UK Government has committed to reaching Net Zero by 2050; 20% of UK emissions stem from agriculture and the food chain and they must be tackled if we are to reach these targets.Sun Bear Bioworks is using precision fermentation to make an alternative to palm oil at scale. We are optimising a naturally oil-producing yeast strain to produce our oil from food waste quickly and efficiently. Our process saves over 4kg CO2 and 2000m2 land for every kg of palm oil - a saving in both cases of 80%. Our project is to make our current strain and process ready for 500L-scale production. This will involve both improving our strain and experimenting with bioreactors and feedstock processing. This builds on the work we carried out as part of our Fast Start award, project 10045430 "Alternative feedstock for precision fermentation of oil", which has allowed us to prove expression of key enzymes in our yeast strain for the metabolism of starch.