Chef-turned-bioengineer Vayu Hill-Maini, an affiliate in the Biological Systems and Engineering Division and at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), is modifying the genes already present in fungi to create innovative new foods that are tasty, healthy, and more environmentally sustainable.
In their recent paper, published today in Nature Communications, Hill-Maini and colleagues began with koji mold, commonly used in East Asia to ferment starches into sake, soy sauce, and miso and developed a gene editing toolkit using CRISPR-Cas9 to boost the nutritional value and heme content. These edits change the color of the fungi to red, making it appear more burger-like. Next steps for this research are to improve the texture and enhance the nutritional value.
This work showcases the huge potential of these organisms to serve as easy-to-grow protein sources that avoid the complex ingredient lists of many meat substitutes and the cost barriers and technical difficulties hindering the launch of cultured meat. Additionally, the team’s gene editing toolkit is a big leap forward for the field of synthetic biology as a whole. Currently, a great variety of biomanufactured goods are made by engineered bacteria and yeast, the single-celled cousins of mushrooms and mold. Yet despite humanity’s long history of domesticating fungi to eat directly or to make staples like miso, multicellular fungi have not yet been harnessed as engineered cellular factories to the same extent because their genomes are far more complex, and have adaptations that make gene editing a challenge. The CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit developed in this paper lays the foundation to easily edit koji mold and its many relatives.
“I think it’s a fundamental aspect of synthetic biology that we’re benefiting from organisms that have evolved to be really good at certain things,” said Hill-Maini. “What we’re trying to do is to look at what is the fungus making and try to kind of unlock and enhance it. And I think that’s an important angle that we don’t need to introduce genes from wildly different species. We’re investigating how we can stitch things together and unlock what’s already there.”
Read more about this research in the Berkeley Lab News Center
