Microbial

Imagine sitting down to a meal with all the sights and textures of a meat-based one, except the beef strips in your stir fry, which happens to be super-charged with flavor, are not actually beef. Only you don’t have to imagine it. The meat of the future is here and it’s alive—but not in the way you might think. It’s a product of the push by a growing number of technology companies to tap into the vastness of microscopic diversity to recreate complex animal-based products, such as steak and bacon. The hope is to meet global protein needs in an environmentally friendly way.

This past week Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced that its DeepMind group has solved a long-standing grand challenge in the scientific community around protein structure prediction. To get a feel for what the impact of this milestone might be, The Spoon asked Sudeep Agarwala, a synthetic microbiologist for Gingko Bioworks, what he thought DeepMind’s work could possibly mean for food.

Solar Foods has been granted €4.3M of new financing from Business Finland to support its €8.6M development project for commercialising Solein, Solar Foods’ natural protein made from air. Business Finland’s financing takes the total Solar Foods’ financing to the total €24.8M.

Alternative protein company Change Foods has raised $875,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding, surpassing its initial target of $600,000. Green Queen Media was first to break the news. Participating in the round were Twitter’s Asia-Pacific VP Maya Hari, abillionveg founder Vikas Garg, game developer Tom Crago, and existing investors Newstead and Klar.

Having secured EUR 2.5 million (USD 3 million) from EU Horizon 2020 – European Innovation Council (EIC) accelerator funding – young U.K.-based carbon recycling biotechnology company Deep Branch is scaling up the development of new proteins for the aqua- and agri-feed sectors, produced from carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from industrial emissions.