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Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

neo.life

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Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#5
I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues:

1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them.

2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way to control the chirality of the proteins (50% will be poisonous mirror images of proteins, think thalidomide). Chiral sorting is still really hard.

3. It will taste nasty.

The article discusses 1 and 3 but 2 is an interesting one that I think doesn’t get much attention.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#7
post #5

I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them. 2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way…

Could you use an enzyme to reliably produce chiral molecules? Maybe we will be able to mass-produce nano-machines or something that could facilitate this on an avogadro's scale.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#8
post #5

I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them. 2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way…

I used to be a biologist and worked a lot with bioreactors.

1 is absolutely true and on top of that, and also since this is meant to become food, you need to be extremely careful to make sure that none of your batches become contaminated by literally anything that lives in the surrounding air, water and all other inputs to the process.

Plus, when you "scale" out your process (i.e. use a bigger bioreactor) these problems grow as much, there is no economy of scale here, quite the contrary the larger this gets the bigger the headaches.

I guess they deserve the benefit of the doubt but I'm bearish on them succeeding. I really hope they prove me wrong, though!

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#10
post #5

I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them. 2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way…

You can go half way and just use micro organisms like algae. Those are very easy to keep alive, they really just need sun and CO2. Then you can use the sugars and lipids as feed stock for the next step.
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