The fungus would ostensibly be much easier and cheaper to cultivate than chicken, with less land required and a reduced impact on the environment.
The breakthrough was first announced in an article entitled “Dual enhancement of mycoprotein nutrition and sustainability via CRISPR-mediated metabolic engineering of Fusarium venenatum,” published in the journal Trends in Biology on November 19.
Fusarium venenatum is an edible fungus that already had a high protein content. A company called Quorn has been growing the fungus and fermenting it into a commercially-available “mycoprotein” or meat substitute for vegan and vegetarian meals. According to Quorn, it can produce edible protein with 95-percent less carbon emissions than a comparable amount of ground beef. Also according to Quorn, the mycoprotein is “delicious.”
The Chinese team used CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a powerful suite of gene-editing tools, to enhance fusarium venenatum so that it would grow faster, with a higher yield of protein, and even less environmental impact. The modified fungus also reportedly tastes better and is easier to digest.
“There is a popular demand for better and more sustainable protein for food. We successfully made a fungus not only more nutritious but also more environmentally friendly by tweaking its genes,” said one of the paper’s authors, Xiao Liu of Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China.
Xiao and his colleagues said they did not have to introduce any foreign DNA into the fungus to accomplish their goals. Instead, they deleted two genes from the fungus that made its cell walls thick and difficult for humans to digest. This tweak also made it possible for the fungus to generate more protein with fewer nutrients.
The resulting strain, dubbed FCPD, uses 44 percent less sugar and produces protein 88 percent faster than unmodified fusarium venenatum. The design team calculated that FCPD grown and harvested at scale would generate 60 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than the original strain, and would require 70 percent less land than comparable chicken farms.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) cited on Monday a 2024 study from the University of California, Davis, that found most current proposals for replacing beef with lab-grown meats on an industrial scale would have minimal net benefits for the environment, and might even be worse than raising beef cattle.
Chicken farming is considered to be more environmentally friendly than beef, so lab-grown protein proposals are usually compared to chicken for taste, nutrition, efficiency, and environmental impact.
The FCPD strain of mycoprotein appears, at least on paper, to be one of the few alternatives that could have significant net environmental benefits compared to chicken farming, coupled with sufficient production speed – assuming, of course, that consumers are willing to eat it.
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