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Engineering biology can help society transition away from an overreliance on costly, single-use materials and unnatural chemicals towards the use of sustainable bioproducts. Produced by biological processes, these items can do things like turn food waste back into edible ingredients, extract bioactive molecules from plants, and create more sustainable health and wellness products.

We convened a group of experts on the r/AskScience subreddit to answer your questions about bioproducts.

  • Ashlee Cannady- Director of Strategic Marketing, Personal Care at Amyris
  • Michelle Casserly McKee, Ph.D.- Director of Plant Cell Development at Ayana Bio
  • Diva Chan- Senior Technology Manager, Product Innovation at Amyris
  • Chris Chuck, Ph.D.– co-founder and CTO of the Clean Food Group
  • Weslee Glenn, Ph.D.- Vice President of Innovation at Ayana Bio
  • Vayu Hill-Maini, Ph.D.– Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, Stanford University
  • Cassandra Newton, Ph.D.- Scientist 1 at Ayana Bio 

Q&A Highlights

Vayu Hill-Maini-

With food, it may be feasible. The food system is massively wasteful, with over 30% of food wasted along the supply chain. This is not just eggshells in your trash can at home; this happens on an industrial scale! For example, as we transform crops into food, we generate byproducts , such as oil press cake, pulp from juicing, etc. The food and agricultural industry produces millions of tons of these byproducts and right now most are sent to landfill. However, our research shows that you may be able to convert this into human food, moving from a linear system to a circular system. It’s hard to create a circular economy but biomanufacturing is ideally positioned to help us make this shift.

Amyris team-

Making “sustainable” products can mean so many things, and what you mean can have a real impact on the price of an overall product. If the “sustainable” part of a product is using less material, it could actually be less expensive to create a sustainable product. In many cases, however, making a sustainable product requires creators to use non-standard raw materials. That can come with a lot of costs, both in sourcing the material and in building the machines to use the materials.

 

Chris Chuck-

When you are trying to make a commodity such as a fuel, an alternative to plastic or an alternative to large-scale agriculture, then inevitably the new product will be expensive as you don’t have the scale or the century of development to drive cost down and yield up. However, a lot of finished products are made from petrochemicals/bulk commodities, which have to be heavily processed first and therefore have a far higher value (and usually environmental footprint) – and this is where biotechnology can shine.

In the food sector, specialty oils and fats needed for their functional behavior (making food work) are made from fractionated and chemically altered mixes of plant oils. We can replace this directly with the oil we produce in the yeast cell we have developed at the Clean Food Group. This allows you to compete on price, while giving a higher value product that works as well.

Ayana Bio team-

Many biotech companies are making old products in a new way. Ayana Bio is making products functionally equivalent to incumbent products.  For example, sage (Salvia officinalis) produces various polyphenols like rosmarinic acid. We use plant cell culture rather than plants grown in the ground to manufacture sage products with high concentrations of rosmarinic acid for various applications like as natural preservatives.

 

Amyris team-

Some of the molecules we make are already found in nature—but just because something is natural doesn’t automatically mean it’s safe for people. In our case of manufacturing personal care ingredients, we follow the same safety testing standards as any ingredients made by traditional means. This includes understanding of any irritation, sensitization potentials, as well as any genotoxicity, carcinogenicity and reproductive toxicity red flags. While most of these studies are carried out in-vitro, for certain studies such as irritation and sensitization, human clinical studies were performed to assess allergic potentials over time.

 

Chris Chuck-

At the Clean Food Group, we have done extensive testing to demonstrate that yeast oils are completely the same as the refined vegetable oils they are replacing and that all the minor components (such as ergosterol) are also found in the food chain (i.e. from mushrooms). We also selected a yeast that is already in the food chain, a wine yeast that grows on grapes all over the world and so has been consumed by humans for millennia.

Finally, we do extensive testing with the regulators and accredited labs to demonstrate these points. This even includes assessing the genome of the species not just for what is produces but what it can feasibly produce – and make sure there are not metabolites of concern there. This way we ensure that what we are producing is safe, fully edible and can fit into our current systems.

Vayu Hill-Maini-

Over 60% of waste in landfills comes from the food system. This causes massive methane emissions, among other things. One of the ways to address this is to waste less foods – this has many dimensions, but includes for more efficient and smarter management systems. Additionally, we could even imagine turning wasted materials into useful products, even into nutritious foods.

 

Chris Chuck-

Food waste itself has a lot going for it – it is packed full of sugars, carbohydrates, oils etc., all of which could either be reworked and reprocessed, used to feed microbes which can produce novel foods and cosmetics, or if too heavily contaminated then broken down into methane. This really addresses a key circularity point of a comment earlier as well. In the UK we have started to collect municipal food waste from homes alongside the recycling and turn it into methane.

Amyris team-

Biotechnology represents an opportunity to move away from petrochemically or unsustainably harvested solutions in a “net positive” kind of way. Yes, we’re replacing production with production, but the climate impact of the old versus the new are demonstrably and empirically not the same.

To give an example, one of our major products in the personal care industry is our attempt to replace something that was sourced from a plant. This plant used an extreme amount of land and water in order to grow at harvestable levels, and our alternative cut land use needed by 230x versus the botanical source and water use by more than half. That’s a real, tangible lessening of the burden on the environment to receive the same amount of product.

Chris Chuck-

With scale you need to be able to scale your emission reductions as well. For example, in my field of alternative foods, we are making a yeast-based replacement for specialty fats and oils made from tropical oils, such as palm oil. We have conducted in-depth life cycle assessments to track the emissions from the process, which gives us confidence that we can save over 90% GHG compared to palm oil or soy-based products, irrespective of the scale of production.

Links related to experts’ work:

Accelerating Impact: Professor Chris Chuck on palm oil alternative to curb deforestation

Microbial foods for improving human and planetary health

From lab to table: Expanding gastronomic possibilities with fermentation using the edible fungus Neurospora intermedia

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