Milk without cows: the European Hydrocow project, funded by the European Innovation Council, aims to produce milk with carbon dioxide (CO2) and electricity, removing the cow from the process. They are working on engineering a microbe that converts CO2 and hydrogen, produced from water using electricity, into beta-lactoglobulin, a major constituent of milk. We interviewed Arttu Luukanen, Senior Vice President of Solar Foods and Coordinator of the Hydrocow project.
You are trying to emulate milk in a bioreactor?
However, these bacteria cannot secrete their products, so in this project we want to modify the organism so that it can export a milk protein beta-lactoglobulin. We chose this protein first because of its properties, which may make the process a bit simpler, but also because of familiarity. Everyone knows what milk is.
In addition, livestock in general, and particularly cows are one of the biggest drivers of global warming. So, aiming to reduce the pressure on the planet by getting microbes to produce some of its elements, it’s a valuable goal.
There are other companies/consortia also aiming towards producing protein in a lab, why focus on this macronutrient?
Arttu Luukanen: We humans need proteins in our diets, not just to build and maintain muscle, but also our brain needs essential amino acids –protein’s building blocks– to produce signaling molecules. In addition, making proteins is a hard process. Most plants are very efficient in accumulating carbohydrates but not so much when it comes to protein (except for crops like pea or soybean), and their amino acid profile is not as close as that of animal protein such as that in milk, for example. That is why we started with a human relevant protein.
But this is just the beginning. Using our technology platform, we could genetically engineer bacteria to produce protein with a determined amino acid profile or other micronutrients, such as iron or beta-carotene, which is a vitamin A precursor, that Solein is rich in.
You expect to have a long-term impact on the production of food and nutrition, materials, medicines, fuels, and chemicals, while I can see how food and nutrition can be affected, how can this process affect medicines?
Arttu Luukanen: The exciting thing about our technological approach is that if successful, we will not only have a method of producing milk protein in a very energy
efficient and sustainable way, but it could also open up avenues to completely different realms. In the future, we could be producing valuable materials such as silk or even pharmaceuticals using cells as a factory that use carbon dioxide and hydrogen as its main feedstocks.
Aside from carbon dioxide, the process requires hydrogen: where does it come from?
Arttu Luukanen: We use green electricity to split the water in the air into hydrogen and oxygen. To ensure that carbon dioxide is clean enough to ensure the high quality of the product, we use off-the-shelf filtering devices. This means we can do this anywhere on the planet where there are green energy sources. In fact, in Finland and elsewhere there are initiatives to use hydrogen as a means to store renewable energy. That way, we would be using a lot of hydrogen when there is surplus energy and less when electricity is scarce –and expensive–. Thus, we could say that this is the most sustainable way of producing protein currently on the planet.
Are consumers interested in eating foods produced in a tank?
Arttu Luukanen: Wine, cheese, and beer exist since immemorial times, so we have been using microbe derived foods for a long time. This is nothing new. We are only now using new kinds of bacteria.
What we need to communicate is, once demonstrated, that our milk protein is safe, and that is has an added bonus of being good to our planet. To evaluate consumer interest in our Solein microbe-based food products, a Finnish food manufacturing company just recently introduced in Singapore a “Fazer Taste the Future,” a vegan snack containing 2% Solein. Singapore is the first market where there is approval for a food product using Solein obtained from carbon dioxide fixation.
Do you think there will be a time when all human foods will be produced in a lab?
Arttu Luukanen: I do think we will completely stop eating animal derived foods, but if we could replace a good bulk of the protein in our processed foods with a nutritious, safe, sustainable alternative, we may decrease the overall environmental burden of farming.
In addition, there is a humanitarian perspective to the ability of producing cheap, nutritious protein foods anywhere. In the poorest parts of the world, children are not getting enough protein to ensure healthy growth. Our intention is to scale production to a point where the cost of the end product is similar to that of whey, pea, or bean protein.