Next-Generation Adaptive Evolution Toolkit to Increase Protein Production in Precision Fermentation

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For novel low-emission foods to reach customers in a way that is affordable and widely accessible (and therefore maximise the positive impact they can have on reducing the carbon emissions and climate impact of our agriculture systems) one of the major challenges that needs to be overcome is **price parity.**After taste, cost is the greatest blocker to public acceptance and adoption of alternative proteins. It is therefore vital that we develop production methods and technologies that decrease the manufacturing cost of novel low-emission proteins to allow them to compete on the market with incumbent products. These incumbent products (e.g. traditional cow's milk, beef, hen's eggs, etc) have decades or centuries of infrastructure and economies-of-scale behind them. Competing with these industries is no small challenge, but a challenge that is vitally necessary to overcome as we push towards Net Zero Ambitions.At Evolutor, our focus is on the production of food proteins using microbes (yeast and bacteria) in precision fermentation systems. Much like how we use yeast to convert sugar into alcohol for beer and wine production, we can engineer these microbial strains to produce meat, dairy and egg proteins. There are many companies around the world already focussed on doing just this (e.g. Better Dairy, Motif Foodworks, Imagindairy, The Every Company and Onego Bio), but they all face a major challenge: how to maximise the protein production capabilities of their precision fermentation manufacturing to drive down cost and hit price parity _v.s._ traditional proteins.Through the innovations of this project, Evolutor and The University of Sheffield are developing **Protein-Infinity:** a microbe optimisation toolkit that will solve this problem in an entirely new way that is **protein-agnostic** and can be applied across diverse precision fermentation sectors to **maximise the project's commercial value and climate impact.**We are doing this by linking protein production to evolutionary selection pressures, creating environments where _"survival-of-the-fittest"_ means _"survival-of-the-highest-protein-producer"_. This strategy and the ground-breaking way in which Protein-Infinity will execute it will rapidly accelerate the commercial viability of precision fermentation UK-wide and beyond. We aim to double protein production, driving novel proteins towards price parity and moving our economy closer to a Bio-Industrial Revolution: producing food proteins that are **affordable, delicious, nutritious, sustainable** and **accessible by all**.