Power-to-vitamins: microbes produce folate from simple basic ingredients
Take some carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen plus electricity from renewable sources – a bacterium and baker’s yeast need little more to produce proteins for human nourishment and the essential vitamin B9 in a conventional laboratory bioreactor system. This was the result achieved by a research team led by Professor Lars Angenent from Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Tübingen during the further development of his power-to-protein system. The new protein product with folate B9 can serve as a vegan basis for meat substitutes, potentially offering a long-term, climate-friendly way to feed a growing world population. The study has been published in Trends in Biotechnology.
Although many microbes are visually unspectacular, they can produce a wide variety of substances that humans can use, for example, in producing beer, wine, and cheese. “We already developed a power-to-protein technology. This utilizes two different microbes in succession: a Clostridium bacterium reduced carbon dioxide with hydrogen under exclusion of air to acetate, which the baker’s yeast, a fungus, then transformed under airflow into proteins,” explains Angenent. This first step only functioned, however, if the microbes were supplied with specific vitamins such as B9. “Humans can’t live on proteins alone,” says Angenent. “So we wanted to produce B9 at the same time.” The goal is not to feed more vitamins into the process than it produces.