BioCoder #4

Real Vegan Cheese

Patrik D’haeseleer, Marc Juul, and Craig Rouskey

Figure 9-1. Team photo

Cheese. The food that all people love. Unless, of course, you’re lactose intolerant, have an autoimmune reaction to cow, goat, or sheep milk proteins, or for a variety of reasons have chosen to be vegan. While a number of vegan cheese products exist, they all rely on a combination of alternate protein sources and thickeners to approximate the coagulation phenomenon that occurs during cheesemaking [1]. Thus, while vegan cheese manufacturers have created many delicious products, and even passable substitutes for some types of cheese, none has so far been able to deliver anything resembling a sharp chedder or aged Gouda. In response to the needs of people with dietary restrictions around animal-derived cheese products, the Real Vegan Cheese team has emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area to deliver broadly consumable real vegan cheese. The team is a collabortive effort between Oakland-based Counter Culture Labs and South Bay–centered BioCurious. These biohacker organizations have joined forces to enter their Vegan Cheese project into the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition taking place in October 2014.

On paper, making Real Vegan Cheese should be simple. First, genetically engineer brewer’s yeast to produce cheese protein. Then, grow the yeast in a bioreactor and purify ...