Scientists have long been captivated by a group of microscopic organisms in Yellowstone National Park. The microbes thrive at extreme temperatures and can efficiently multiply with limited resources. The feat has inspired a company called Sustainable Bioproducts, which is replicating the process in a laboratory and eventually, it hopes, at a large scale.
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Sustainable Bioproducts said it feeds common components of food such as starches or glycerin to the already high-protein microbes, which then quickly multiply. The resulting protein, like meat or soy, contains the nine amino acids considered essential to the human diet. But the end product wouldn’t necessarily resemble meat. “It could be some things that are more meat-like,” said Thomas Jonas, the company’s chief executive officer. “It can be savory; it can be sweet; it can be liquid; it can be dairy-like.”
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….Sustainable Bioproducts hopes to have a product to sell within two years, Jonas said. “These extremophiles learned to be extremely efficient in using their resources,” he said. “They are very relevant at a point in time when humanity already uses tremendous amounts of resources to support the highly inefficient animal-protein model.”
Read full, original article: Do These Tiny Organisms Hold the Key to Lab-Grown Food?