Team:RUBochum/Implementation
Platypus yogurt: A way to revolutionize food production.
Milk and milk products are produced en mass. In 2019, in the EU alone 146 million tons were processed. But the dairy industry is also known for its huge impact on the environment due to antibiotics, emerging greenhouse gases, high water consumption, and pollution. Due to climate change and an ever-growing world population, it is impossible to allow a sustainable supply of conventional dairy products.
Many animals like the platypus are at risk due to the impacts of the dairy industry.
Cows are destroying breeding places of platypuses at the rivers of Tasmania and their natural habitat by promoting eutrophication.
Our goal is to make synthetic milk with an optimized process to make it affordable for all people. From people that want to save the environment to normal consumers that do not renounce the natural milk taste.
We envisioned that the end-users are people who want more sustainable milk products that don't rely on farming and have less impact on the environment. This would include people who don't want to live without animal products and those who don't consume milk and dairy products because of ethical and environmental concerns.
This theory was confirmed by our survey about diary and alternative animal-free product consumption.
The project should not only have a big impact on milk production, but also aims to motivate other people to start and support synthetic food production.
Synthetic milk production can be implemented at any place in the world and thus close to consumers. It enables the production of dairy food without animal suffering, less water consumption, and environmental pollution.
With innovation and the reconstructing of a market, many challenges are included.
Acceptance for new products and their ways of production needs to be built in the population. The production also should enable the creation of new jobs and shouldn't cause socio-economic disparities.
It should allow a safe process with no risks for the environment and people.
Safety considerations are especially important for food production in general and also in the laboratory.
If the milk proteins are produced with a plasmid-based system containing selection markers, the purification steps must be adjusted in a way that none of the used antibiotics are present in the final product. A possible solution for this issue would be the integration of the genes into the genome of the yeast cells so that there is no need for selection markers.
It is also important that no unwanted by-products or toxic substances are present in the final product.
This can be avoided with rigorous testing and selection of a non-pathogenic host organism that doesn't produce toxic substances which can be harmful to humans, like yeast.
The EU provides a legal framework of regulations for food that is produced with or contains Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
The EU provides a legal framework of regulations for food that is produced with or contains Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
Figure 1: RUBochum platypus vanilla yogurt.