From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Lab-Grown Flavors Are Coming to Your Food and Drink   
   By Anna Kramer, July 21, 2023, WSJ   
      
   The chilled pint glass has a dark golden hue, nearly opaque. Before the first   
   icily bitter sip bathes your tongue, a fizzing waft of pineapple juice and   
   freshly squeezed grapefruits hits your nose—hallmarks of a classic hazy IPA.    
      
   Or nearly classic. The signature fruitiness in an IPA usually comes from hops,   
   the flowers that give many varieties of beer their flavors. But if you order   
   this beer at a local brewery in San Francisco, Los Angeles or Seattle, the   
   flavors may also come    
   from the excretions of genetically modified yeast, sold by a company called   
   Berkeley Yeast.   
      
   “They’re making new and interesting and different flavors that I can’t   
   get elsewhere,” says Ryan Hammond, head brewer at Temescal Brewing in   
   Oakland, Calif., which uses a combination of hops and genetically modified   
   yeasts to around half of its    
   beers.   
      
   Someday the flavors and smells added to most foods and drinks could be created   
   in yeast-brewing tanks rather than extracted from plants or synthesized in   
   labs, some researchers predict. Around two decades ago, scientists found that   
   tweaking the genes in    
   yeast—a single-cell fungus—could cause it to produce a variety of   
   compounds. Today yeasts are being genetically engineered to produce flavor   
   molecules in research that could eventually lead to entirely new and   
   unfamiliar tastes.   
      
   “Let’s pretend all the cinnamon trees in the world went extinct. We can   
   still get yeast to spit out cinnamic acid,” says Patrick Gibney, a professor   
   who runs a cell biology and microbiology lab for Cornell University’s   
   College of Agriculture and    
   Life Sciences. “If you can find a strong flavor protein or metabolite,   
   presumably you could figure out a way to engineer some microbes to make it,”   
   he says.    
      
   Using flavors produced by yeasts could save money, use fewer scarce   
   environmental resources and allow less dependence on harvests vulnerable to   
   weather, proponents say. Many flavors and aromas have been expensive to   
   produce since the era of Silk Road    
   trading. In the early 20th century, chemists discovered that byproducts of   
   petrochemical processing could be used to synthesize flavors in a lab, and   
   many food companies still produce artificial flavors such as vanilla and   
   cherry this way.   
      
   Some flavor molecules—like musk and those found in coconut, pineapple and   
   butter—can be difficult to synthesize. Creating those chemicals through a   
   biological process involving enzymes and engineered microbes is comparatively   
   much simpler, says Jay    
   Keasling, a chemical and biomolecular engineer who leads a lab at the   
   University of California at Berkeley that investigates practical applications   
   for engineering the metabolism inside microbial cells.    
      
   “Before Jay [Keasling] pioneered this field, the idea that you could   
   engineer a microbe to make any chemical compounds in the natural world was   
   totally science fiction,” says Berkeley Yeast co-founder Charles Denby, who   
   worked as a researcher in    
   Keasling’s laboratory.    
      
   For now, such yeast-created flavors can be difficult to make in large   
   quantities. But most food products don’t require very large amounts of   
   flavoring compared with other ingredients, Denby says. “Unlike specialty   
   agriculture like hops or fruit,    
   where the life cycle is years if not decades, with this technology you can   
   scale up or down practically instantaneously.”    
      
   To bioengineer yeast to excrete a specific flavor molecule, scientists   
   identify the genetic code used to produce the flavor in a fruit or flower, for   
   instance, and insert it into the yeast. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the basic   
   bread-maker’s yeast, is    
   commonly used.   
      
   The technology to easily sequence and identify these genetic strands has only   
   become accessible in the last decade. Today, biotech startups can go a step   
   further, applying computational modeling to their genetic databases to find   
   pathways that could    
   cause the yeast to produce desired molecules.    
      
   “We can get certain flavors and fragrances that you may really like from a   
   plant, but you’re limited in terms of how much you can extract, or it’s   
   not feasible to grow that kind of crop,” says Patrick Boyle, a synthetic   
   biologist at Boston-based    
   Ginkgo Bioworks, whose products include flavors and aromas produced from   
   genetically modified yeasts. He heads the “codebase” team that   
   investigates and stores genetic code to create various flavors and other   
   products for the biotech startup.   
      
   A potential hurdle for wide use of yeast-produced flavors is the idea that   
   they are made by genetically modified organisms. That could slow adoption by   
   major food companies that are sensitive to some consumers’ distrust of GMOs,   
   researchers say.    
   Consumer skepticism has lingered since the late 1990s, when some staple crops   
   were genetically modified to withstand pesticides, a practice en   
   ironmentalists argued would lead to indiscriminate spraying. Today, polls show   
   that some consumers fear GMOs    
   could be harmful to health and the environment.   
      
   In flavors produced by genetically modified yeasts, the compounds themselves   
   are usually chemically identical to their counterparts found in plants, and   
   thus generally aren’t required to carry any GMO label in the U.S.   
      
   However, simply marketing products as technically non-GMO isn’t a viable   
   business strategy for the longer term, says Boyle of Ginkgo Bioworks, who   
   believes such foods are safe. “We want people to understand and interact   
   with the technology that goes    
   into making their food.”   
      
   Keasling agrees. “If we’re going to feed a planet of 10 billion people in   
   the future, we’re going to have to have genetic modification, and it’s   
   going to have to be in things like flavors to make food palatable,” he says.   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/food-drink-flavoring-fungus-bf45fc96   
      
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