Real Vegan Cheese : DIYbio Project 1

Vegan's cop a hard time when it comes to food. For some it's a choice, for others it's definitely not a choice, in the end vegans are normally limited in choices for food. That's not the case for cheese according to a joint project in the Bay Area.

A team of BioHackers and Scientists in San Francisco CA, from two spaces, Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious, are teaming up as well as sourcing help from volunteers (citizen scientists) to bring the world the first alternative to animal made cheese using bakers yeast. They hope to make real vegan cheese. While some think this will be a major source of income, a quick look at their project Wiki shows that they intend to keep this technology free for the public by patenting it and abandoning it.

This isn't just good news for Vegans though, it's also a huge plus for our environment and food sustainability. Farm animals contribute dozens of polluting gasses, including those that effect the climate. In addition, deforestation occurs on grand proportions to establish new grazing areas to support demand for animal based foods, many of these farm animals are exposed to various forms of animal cruelty. Alleviating the demand for these animal products isn't just in the best interests of vegans by any means.

So our friends aim to achieve the goal of vegan cheese by profiling the type of proteins found in animal based cheeses, and mimicking this in the baker's yeast. While this may sound like a simple case of copying and pasting DNA from one organism into another, there is a lot of energy that goes into the designing this project. Things such as immune reactions to milk need to be considered when selecting for the right protein variant, how fast a Ribosome can translate mRNA into protein to allow for proper folding of the protein, even the codon usage for genes needs to be considered as different species have different codon tRNA pairings. Another way to think of this is that the characters you're reading right now are being pronounced in your head in English. What if you spoke French and knew no English and tried to pronounce these words in French? There may be some similarities but in large it would sound pretty crazy. In essence, these cattle milk genes have been retrofitted to be able to be read and work inside of yeast cells to create the right kind of cheese proteins.

But wait cheese comes from milk not just cheese proteins right?
In order to keep this vegan cheese REAL vegan cheese, a milk substitute had to be created. This was created by concocting a blend of vegetable butter, vegan friendly sugar, and then finally the yeast cheese proteins and some good ol Dihydrogen Monoxide (water). Finally using the same cheese making processes for making non vegan cheese, they hope to create various types of cheeses from this finished product! Now all can enjoy cheese, and that's Gouda for everyone.