Real Vegan Cheese

Project pages:

• Molecular biology
• Cheese making

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.