Chicken protein without chicken!

A vegetable-based chicken protein based on a fungus can make the use of eggs in the food industry unnecessary. Within a few years FunGeneX, a subsidiary of BioscienZ, wants to launch the product on the market. 

Chicken protein

Bakery, dairy and meat products and meat substitutes. All these foods use chicken protein as a binding agent. But what does it take to produce a single egg per day that contains only 3% binding protein? A chicken, 550 square centimetres of living space and 132 grams of chicken feed, which in itself also needs space to grow. A lot of inefficiency, which leads to global warming. How are we going to feed a rapidly growing population of 9 billion people, with more than 25 billion chickens worldwide and only 1500 million hectares of agricultural land? 

How does it work?

FunGeneX grows organically modified fungi to produce chicken protein to bind products. They put their synthetically developed DNA into the core of the fungus, to start producing protein. The company then grows the fungi in fermenters using a combination of sugar beet juice and ammonia. Why sugar beet? Because the yield is twice as high as wheat. Finally, filtration separates the protein from the moulds and the protein is ready for use. This enables FunGeneX to produce proteins faster and more efficiently. 

BioscienZ

BioscienZ: "We are very pleased to announce that as part of a government SBIR programme, Novel Food Challenge researchers working in our fermentation lab have converted the successful over-expression of the chicken egg albumin gene into a fungus with GRAS status and a very high protein production capacity in a study. The amounts were twenty times higher than the currently published data in other bacterial or yeast systems. This opens the way to a commercial process within the next 5 years".