This development will only increase due to an ever-growing world population.
More and more people are questioning and adjusting their diet in order to find new ways to contribute to the protection of the climate. To enable a sustainable food supply, synthetically produced alternatives to conventionally produced farming products need to emerge.
Our goal is to use the DNA of cows and the platypus to produce milk proteins with Pichia pastoris that do not differ in their molecular structure from those of these animals. By additionally synthesizing fatty-acids, brazzein and vanillin, we are aiming to produce tasty
PLATYPUS YOGURT.
This would offer an equivalent substitute for those who do not necessarily want to switch to plant-based alternatives, but do not want to contribute to and further advance global warming, unsustainable agriculture, and animal exploitation.
It is advisable to use yeast, in our case Pichia pastoris, as expression organisms, as they have a manageable genome size-wise that is simple to modify. In addition, the post-translational modifications of the yeast make it easy to synthesize the correct products of our desired proteins.
But while we try to do our part in the fight to produce enough food for a growing world population and act against climate change, we are simultaneously raising awareness for the platypus, a species especially at risk because of dairy farming and its environmental impacts.
Figure 1: Geoff Williams, Australian Platypus Conservancy, approves of Project Platylicious
picturecredit: mappingmegan - platypus photo taken by Mike Jerrard and Pattern Vectors by Vecteezy