Precision fermentation alternative to palm oil

棕榈油随处可见。它存在于食品、化妆品和生物燃料中。它存在于我们50%的超市产品中。棕榈油在植物油市场上是独一无二的；它在你的嘴里融化，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者之一，因为为了给种植园让路而失去了热带雨林和泥炭地--从1900万公顷的热带土地上，棕榈油贡献了超过5亿吨二氧化碳，占全球排放量的1%。它已经造成了包括猩猩和太阳熊在内的大量栖息地的丧失，而且小农户的产品往往得不到公平的价格。英国政府承诺到2050年达到净零排放；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。太阳熊生物工程公司正在使用精确发酵来大规模生产棕榈油的替代品。我们正在优化一种天然的产油酵母菌株，以快速高效地从食物垃圾中生产我们的油脂。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--在两种情况下都节省了80%。我们的项目是使我们目前的菌株和工艺准备好500L的规模生产。这将包括改进我们的菌株，并试验生物反应器和原料加工。这是建立在我们作为快速启动奖的一部分开展的工作的基础上的，项目10045430“精准发酵油脂的替代原料”使我们能够证明我们的酵母菌株中表达了淀粉新陈代谢的关键酶。

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.