Cell Based Tech Weekly – Magic Mushroom Fermentation, Impossible Burger Hitting a Shelf Near You, New Engineering

Categories Weekly Report

🍄 Researchers at The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability in Denmark, published a study demonstrating the viability of engineering a metabolic pathway for the expression of psilocybin in yeast → fed batch fermentation was carried out using glucose feedstock. https://cellbased.link/g4h 

  • The final titer of psilocybin from the researchers top producing strain: 140mg/L
  • Further engineering will be required to improve on the efficiency of the metabolic pathway
  • Researchers also discovered the ability to produce a host of natural and new-to-nature tryptamine derivatives, chemicals that have known interactions with serotonin receptors

Magic Mushrooms made biotech news last October when University of Miami Ohio scientists cultivated 1.16 grams of psilocybin per liter. 

  • Important Caveat: University of Miami Ohio researchers incorporated some important supplements into the fermentation media perhaps to increase yield, but may prove to be too costly. 

Publicity

🍔 In a Live Virtual Press Conference, Impossible Foods announced the roll out of Impossible Burger into 777 additional retail outlets making the products now available in around 1,000 retail stores in total including:

  • Safeway (NorCal), Albertsons, Vons, and Pavilions (SoCal), and Jewel-Osco (Chicago), Wegmans in eastern seaboard and Fairway markets in NYC region
  • Why We Care: Major meatpacking plants including Tyson, JBS, Smithfield have been shuttered amidst COVID-19 related shutdowns. Impossible CEO, Pat Brown stated during the press conference, that Impossible production plants are more automated and less crowded than traditional meat packaging facilities — impeccable timing for the company to step in where traditional meat may quite literally be falling short.

Advancements

🆓 Cell [FREE] Based Tech advancements emerging out of Northwestern Center for Synthetic Biology:

  • Specifically, scientist Michael Jewett and his team of researchers have developed a platform for engineering ribosomes to make new types of polymers by isolating the ribosomes outside of the cells. https://cellbased.link/7ta 
  • Background: Engineering living organisms (yeast, algae, e coli) comes with constraints including the cells evolutionary drive to grow rather than singularly focus on the biosynthesis of target products. https://cellbased.link/eu5 
  • Bottom line: By removing the cells, Jewett and his team of researchers “provide an unprecedented and otherwise unattainable freedom of design to modify and control biological systems”.
  • All this said, it’s interesting to see an alternative engineering approach!