Real Vegan Cheese

This is a project to make real vegan cheese by engineering normal baker's yeast (S. cerevisiae) to express milk protein (casein), purifying the protein, creating a milk-substitute by blending in vegan replacements for lactose and milkfat, and finally turning the resulting milk-substitute into semi-hard cheese like gouda using the normal cheese-making process.

The main challenges involve:

• Getting the major casein-proteins secreted.
• Achieving a high level of expression.
• Ensuring the required post-translational modifications take place.
• Cost-efficient protein purification.
• Stable micelle-formation.
• Finding a suitable milk-fat replacement.

Project pages

• Molecular biology
• Cheese making
• Ethics and environmental impact
• Vegan cheese/Product viability

External communications

• Awesome foundation SF
  • Reason: $1000 grant application
  • Contacted by: (?)
• Awesome without borders
  • Reason: $1000 grant application
  • Contacted by: (?)
• Chr Hansen
  • Reason: Possible sponsorship of microbial Chymosin and Lactic Acid Bacteria
  • Contacted by Juul (talk) 17:47, 17 April 2014 (PDT)
  • Result: The relevant employee is away on easter vacation. Should hear back after easter.
• BGI
  • Access to narwhal casein protein and kinase sequences if it exists
  • Contacted by Juul (talk) 17:47, 17 April 2014 (PDT)
  • Result: They did not have narwhal. They quoted us $1500 to $2000 for full genome Narwhal mRNA sequencing.

Shared files

We use Seafile to share files. You can use the web interface to access our public files here:

• download
• upload

Unfortunately many of our files are not public since most of the relevant scientific articles use closed licenses that don't allow us to share them publicly.

If you want to collaborate on this project and get access to our private files, you probably want to install the Seafile app (get version 2.1.x) and request an account from info@counterculturelabs.org.

Mailing list

The iGEM team has a mailing list but we're waiting for the admin to mark it as public so we can link it here.

Meeting notes

• iGEM team meeting notes 3/31/14
• iGEM team meeting notes 3/24/14

Reasons why the vegan cheese project is awesome

1. It will get a lot of attention to Counter Culture Labs (great PR angle)
2. It could be used to show the local environmentalist organizations that GMO itself is not pure evil and that we (CCL) are on their side (which I feel that we are). E.g. Sierra Club, Earth First, Greenpeace, etc.
3. It can involve people who don’t have much lab experience, since we’ll have to actually make cheeses both with milk (to ensure that we can make cheese at all), with dried casein from milk and butter (to ensure that we can reconstitute the casein into something that can be used to make cheese) and with dried casein and a milkfat replacement.
4. It is something that will be potentially useful over a relatively short timespan.
5. It is ethically awesome
6. It could turn into a commercial product
7. Selling the worlds first real vegan cheese at an auction could fetch CCL quite a bit of money.
8. Everyone loves cheese (ok maybe not everyone).
9. Nutritional yeast is already used as a cheese substitute by many vegans, so we could make a cheaper less purified product and still have it be a viable cheese substitute.
10. It is fairly realistic to at least express the protein in yeast and the project can easily be divided into separate phases with their own independent success criteria, many of which can be worked on in parallel (express protein, export protein from cell, express a lot of protein, purify protein, make cheese from protein, find viable replacement for milkfat, scale up production).
11. We could label the cheese “Ethical GMO” or “Non-evil GMO” or invent our own term. Maybe a backronym Genetically Magnificent Organism. Genetically Modified and Open.
12. We will have to use another sugar than lactose (probably not a problem, lactobacteria can live on other sugars), which will make our cheese lactose free.
13. Marc has already built a wifi-enabled cheese cave out of a wine cooler that we can use to age our cheese prototypes.
14. There is _so_ much info available on cheese chemistry because cheese industry.
15. Chymosin, the rennet enzyme, is already commercially produced by genetically modified organisms. They label it “microbially produced” and most major cheeses use it so also producing the casein protein shouldn’t make any difference with regards to law/regulation.