Engineering biology for animal-free cheese protein production

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Plant-based cheese is important. In the UK, we produce over 500,000 tons of dairy cheese per year. However, dairy farming produces a lot of methane, which is a highly harmful greenhouse gas.As a result, people are changing what they eat, with more people adopting animal-low, or animal-free diets. Food companies are developing more and more plant-based products to meet this need, like plant-based cheese.There's a challenge in producing enough of the right proteins for animal-free products. Current systems for doing this are expensive to build and operate. Fermtech are an Oxford-based biotech start-up developing an ultra low-cost way to produce animal-free proteins to do the job. The technology harnesses the power of fungi, grown on waste biomass as a feedstock, creating a circular economy, and keeping costs low.This project will allow us to test how this production system can be developed for commercial-scale production, taking the first step to getting great-tasting, low-carbon, animal-free dairy products on supermarket shelves quickly.