Real Vegan Cheese

The goal of this project is 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. Watch a brief video about the project.

The main challenges include:

• Biology
  • Find all the nitty-gritty on how we engineer our host organism to produce cheese proteins in our pages on molecular biology, cloning strategy, gBlock design, plasmid design, Yeast Transformation.
  • Getting the major casein proteins expressed, and ideally secreted.
  • Achieving a high level of expression.
  • Ensuring any necessary post-translational modifications take place.
  • Cost-efficient protein purification.
  • Stable micelle-formation.
  • Finding a suitable milk-fat replacement.
  • Finding a suitable lactose replacement
  • Can we achieve the same flavor and aroma profile using the traditional cheese ripening bacterial cultures?

• Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications
  • A comparison between yeast bioreactors and dairy cows will be essential
  • Can we produce this cheese in a way that is (a) better for the environment, and (b) economically feasible? Check our page on Life Cycle Assessments and Techno-Economic Analyses

• Safety
  • Ensuring a safe and responsible research environment is already a key goal of CCL and BioC, but we will have to field potential safety concerns specifically related to the Real Vegan Cheese project.
  • Check out the Community Biology Safety Handbook, edited with help from some of our members.

• Funding and spreading the word
  • We have raised about $37,000 on indiegogo and the funding we raised is being used on developing the feasibility of producing Real Vegan Cheese from baker's yeast.

• Patents
  • We plan to patent and abandon to keep this technology free for everyone

• Education
  • Providing hands-on lab training.
  • Check out our Educational Videos about many parts of the process!

Getting involved

So, you want to join the Real Vegan Cheese project? - Orientation for new folks - September 2022 blog post.

Here are some different ways to get involved:

• Go to one of our Monday evening working meetings 7pm PST:
  • Counter Culture Labs Meetup calendar
  • BioCurious Meetup calendar
• Read our Introductory mini-textbook (work in progress)
• Get on one or more of our mailing lists
• Help fund the project
• Send us an email at info@counterculturelabs.org
• Add to this wiki.

Project topics

• Science
  • Molecular biology
  • Microbiology
  • Cloning strategy
  • gBlock design
  • Yeast Transformation
  • Protein Expression in Yeast
  • Plasmid design
  • Bacterial cultures
  • Educational Videos
• Narwhal Cheese!
• Experiments started January 2016
• Shared Laboratory Notebook
• How to take notes and record data
• Questions and answers
• Cheese making
• Existing vegan cheeses
• Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications
• Health effects: allergy and cancer link
• Product viability
• Budget, planning and orders
• Wetware inventory
• Software
• External communications
• Service and reagent providers - Sequencing, synthesis, enzymes, etc.
• Bureaucracy
• Video - Video and audio documentation, teleconferencing and live-streaming
• Finances - Incoming monies, purchases, etc.
• Media - Articles written about us
• Similar projects - Other people doing similar stuff