Sustainable alternatives to agriculturally intensive oils

Over 11 years, Professor Christopher Chuck and his team at the University of Bath have developed sustainable alternatives to oils and fats, such as palm oil.

The search for a solution to palm oil has been progressing for decades. Reducing edible oil production without a range of sustainable alternatives would be a great risk to food security and would likely affect low-income countries the most. To feed our growing population, we need to increase food and edible oil production.

To address growing public demand and to scale up alternative oil production to a commercially viable level, Professor Chuck co-founded Clean Food Group. The team developed a commercial strain of Metschnikowia pulcherrima, a strain of yeast used in winemaking. This increased its growth rate three-fold, reaching the threshold for commercial viability. By using food waste as the carbon source for the yeast, a circular food system is promoted.

The company uses food-safe waste as a feedstock and renewable energy to fuel the process, which involves growing the yeast in industrial fermenters. Clean Food Group need only a 1,500-litre fermentation vessel, which takes up only 1m² of space, to produce the same yearly amount as a hectare of palm (3.7 tonnes). It would produce less than 5% of the greenhouse gases of soy or palm.

Commercial partnerships have been critical to the technology, commercialisation, and resulting impact.

Early BBSRC and EPSRC funding came via the NIBB Plants to Products Network in Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy.

Generating food from agricultural waste  

Up to two-thirds of plant material grown on farms is not inputted into the food system. The Supplant Company builds on BBSRC-supported research into the breakdown of plant material by enzymes to solve this problem.

In fact, Supplant co-founders Dr Tom Simmons and Professor Paul Dupree are combating three key issues in food production at once: food security, nutrition, and sustainability. Their approach creates healthier ingredients that contribute towards tackling the human health issues of obesity and diabetes. They do so using existing farming efforts while using up to 97% less land, resulting in reduced emissions.

From corn cobs and similar by-products, Supplant created Supplant™ Sugars from Fiber. This cane sugar replacement is prebiotic, lower in calories, and has less impact on blood sugar levels (compared to glucose), yet functions well in many products such as cakes. A flour alternative has now also been developed, Supplant™ Grain and Stalk Flour, which uses wheat grain and stalk to produce a high-fibre product with fewer calories compared to standard flour.

Supplant’s products are on sale in both the UK and the US. Pasta made with Supplant™ Grain and Stalk Flour is also being served at university dining halls in the UK, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, London School of Economics and Political Science, and King’s College London, among others.

Supplant has received venture capital and Innovate UK funding to further improve its products and expedite commercialisation. Early BBSRC funding through the Sustainable Bioenergy Centre: Cell wall sugars programme supported the background technology for the company's first business plan. After Supplant was founded, BBSRC supported the company through the NIBB LBNet: Lignocellulosic Biorefinery Network.

Algae as a source of a natural blue food colouring

A collaboration between researchers at the University of Edinburgh (UoE) and the biotech company ScotBio has facilitated increased yield, quality, and consistency of ScotBio’s natural blue colouring product.

The colouring comes from a pigment produced by blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), phycocyanin. However, the process for growing cyanobacteria has historically been unreliable and inefficient. UoE and ScotBio partnered in 2013 to solve this problem, developing a new reliable and scalable system for production and purification of blue colouring.

Professor Alistair McCormick’s lab at UoE has played a key role in commercial product development supported by proof-of-concept funding from PHYCONET through BBSRC’s NIBB and Bioinformatics and Biological Resources Fund.

The PHYCONET network encourages the translation of academic research into real-world products by working with industry and strengthened the collaborative relationship with ScotBio. The funding enabled the development of a purification method for phycocyanin that generated both high yields and a purity level suitable for food and textile colouring and pharmaceutical and therapeutic markets.

Joint funding from BBSRC, through AlgaeUK (successor to PHYCONET), and the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre has supported further research by McCormick into the industrial production of thermotolerant blue colouring from easily cultivated cyanobacterium species. Normally cyanobacteria produce a form of phycocyanin that is unstable at higher temperatures, limiting its industrial use. Other cyanobacteria produce more heat stable phycocyanin forms but are difficult and slow to grow, giving low pigment yields.

McCormick has used genetic transformation to generate a cyanobacteria strain that grows rapidly and produces heat stable phycocyanin, making the process of thermostable blue pigment production high yielding and more environmentally friendly.

Bacteria to the rescue: lowering cell culture costs

Caf1 is a bacterial protein that helps to protect the bacteria from the host’s immune response during infection. It has historically attracted scientific attention for its use as a vaccine. Jeremy Lakey, Professor of Structural Biochemistry at Newcastle University, began working with Caf1 over 20 years ago. His sustained research into the protein allowed him to see potential applications of Caf1 beyond vaccines.

In 2015, Professor Lakey was awarded joint Industrial Biotechnology Catalyst funding from Innovate UK, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and BBSRC to develop production processes for Caf1-based biomaterials. The manufacture and use of Caf1 in cell culture was developed in this project.

Further product development, aided by BBSRC Follow-on Funding, allowed Professor Lakey to establish the spin-out MarraBio in 2023. The company engineers Caf1 versions that mimic the functions of proteins traditionally used in mammalian cell culture. MarraBio’s Caf1 products make cell culture simpler and cheaper, helping to accelerate the development of novel therapeutics.

Recently, MarraBio has partnered with Aelius Biotech and the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) in an Innovate UK-funded project to engineer materials for producing lab-cultivated meat.

Aelius Biotech is another Newcastle University spin-out, specialising in modelling digestion. They developed the technology as an alternative to animal testing under a series of BBSRC-funded projects. Using their in vitro systems, Aelius Biotech will model the fate of MarraBio’s Caf1 products through the digestive tract. The technology innovation catalyst CPI is providing expertise in bioprocessing systems and food regulations.

Applying MarraBio’s Caf1 technology to cultivated meat could support the expansion of this industry by facilitating bioprocess innovation and reducing costs.

Optimising metal use in biomanufacturing: the Metalation calculator

Metals are critical for biology and a massive variety of industrial processes. They are used in lead batteries, mercury dental fillings, or copper-containing fungicides. Metals such as iron, cobalt, zinc, copper, or manganese are vital for around a third of proteins (and half of enzymes) to function. However, metals can also be toxic to humans and the environment, so their use must be controlled.

From Postgraduate studies to Emeritus Professor, sustained BBSRC (and predecessors SERC and AFRC) funding enabled Nigel Robinson (Biosciences and Chemistry, Durham University) to decode how proteins acquire their correct metals inside living cells. With support from the BBSRC NIBB Elements of Bioremediation, Biomanufacturing & Bioenergy (E3B): Metals in Biology network, Professor Robinson and colleagues, including Dr Peter Chivers, developed and deployed a metalation calculator. This calculator, now an online tool, can be used to predict protein metalation in bacteria.

Researchers and industry can use the tool to calculate how much metal they need for their process, reducing costs and avoiding hazardous excess. Beyond toxicity, and because metalation is essential for half the reactions of life, such calculators will also help with experimental design so that the right metals bind to enzymes in engineered biology. A great example of the calculator in action can be found in our Better B12: safer and sustainable production case study, where it was applied to the production of vitamin B12. Dr Tessa Young, while at Durham University, and Professor Martin Warren at the Quadram Institute (who helped develop the calculator) led the B12 project. This has minimised the use of surplus cobalt for B12 production.

Textile recycling: giving old clothes a new life

The production and disposal of textile products present a real threat to the health of our planet. Producing new textile materials is an energy- and water-intensive process, depleting natural resources and emitting carbon. Equally, once textiles reach the end of their lives, they are often landfilled or incinerated, both of which release pollutants.

To avoid this, as well as encouraging consumers to extend the lives of their textiles, efforts are being made by the textile industry to recycle products, generating new textiles from manufacturing and consumer waste and low-value materials.

Jinsong Shen, a Professor of Textile Chemistry and Biotechnology at De Montfort University, has partnered with Loughborough University and industry (Camira Fabrics, The Woolmark Company and Fox Brothers & Co Ltd) to contribute towards this mission. In a BBSRC-funded project, as part of the Circular Bioeconomy fund, Professor Shen is studying how enzymes can be used to create surface patterns on fabrics, repair damaged wool fibres and separate wool-blended fabrics into their constituent fibres so that they can be more easily reused.

The effort to separate wool-blended fibres has proven successful, establishing the potential for their reuse in the textile industry. Alongside this, the project has successfully demonstrated that dyes can be recovered from waste textiles and reused for textile colouration.

Professor Shen says: “This research paves the way for more efficient and effective recycling of textiles. It provides a potential solution to the challenges associated with blended textiles and contributes to the development of sustainable and circular practices in the textile industry.”