Hard-core evolutionary genomics research, cheesy PR stunt, or recreational crypto-phylo-mythozoology - pick your own adventure!
The Real Vegan Cheese project at Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious has half-jokingly claimed we can make cheese from any mammal with a sequenced genome - even something as weird as Narwhal. Well, the Narwhal genome just got published. Time to get serious!
In this one-of-a-kind workshop, Patrik will dig into the casein genes that produce the cheese proteins in milk, look at the casein gene cluster in the genome, examine the evolution of narwhals and other whales from other mammals (did you know the closest land mammal to whales is the hippo?), and more.
If you want to contribute to some serious science - there are at least one or two publishable scientific papers that we can work on, about the evolution of the casein gene cluster in whales. Or if you want to jump on board with our Real Vegan Cheese project, we can go over how to take the Narwhal casein genes and express them in yeast or E. coli for recombinant protein production. And if you really want to know what unicorn cheese would taste like - we can get into Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction from narwhal, horses, and... rhinos?
Patrik D'haeseleer is a computational, synthetic and systems biologist who likes to inject some fun in his science, co-founder of Counter Culture Labs, and one of the of the original members of the award-winning Real Vegan Cheese project. https://realvegancheese.org/
On Narwhal Cheese, the Evolution of Whales, and Imaginary Phylogeny of Unicorns