Researchers in Germany can harvest protein and vitamin B9 from microbes by feeding them nothing much more than hydrogen, oxygen, and CO2. The technology, published September 12 in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, runs on renewable energy to produce a sustainable, micronutrient-enriched protein alternative that may one day make it to our plates.
“This is a fermentation process similar to how you make beer, but instead of giving the microbes sugar, we gave them gas and acetate,” says corresponding author Largus Angenent of the University of Tübingen, Germany. “We knew that yeast could produce vitamin B9 on their own with sugar, however, we didn’t know if they could do the same with acetate.”
“We are approaching 10 billion people in the world,…
