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

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是通过利用微生物多样性制作培养食品来建立一个更可持续的食品系统。越来越多的人意识到动物产品对环境和健康造成的危害，这促使许多人寻求植物性食品，但这种寻求往往因不开胃和昂贵的产品而受阻。例如，奶酪是西餐中最受欢迎的食物之一，但按重量计算，它的碳足迹比鸡肉或猪肉要大，而且含有三分之二的人无法消化的乳糖。到目前为止，植物奶酪还没有达到与乳制品奶酪相似的浓郁风味。拟建项目将搭建一个平台，以可持续原料快速开发新型养殖食品。拟议的项目将系统地挖掘微生物生物多样性，以获得可用于制造培养食品的新菌株。发明新型培养食品的一个关键技术障碍是缺乏分析复杂微生物群落和化学混合物的工具。利用微生物生态学和分析化学的高通量方法，这项工作旨在快速评估微生物创造引人注目的味道的潜力。这是一个反复的过程，包括鉴定、分离、优化和组合微生物菌株，这些菌株与制作高质量植物奶酪的过程相兼容。他们的主要目标是制作一种新的硬质陈年奶酪，既能体现乳制品奶酪的复杂性和成瘾性，又能大大减少对自然资源的需求。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.