Among the most common pieces of feedback we receive from new members, is “wow, that was a lot!“ Like any big project, there’s a decent bit of science involved in doing what we do, but thankfully most of us learned it right here, through contributing to Real Vegan Cheese.
There are usually three main questions new members seek to have answered.
How does biotech work?
How does the science of cheese work?
How is Real Vegan Cheese different from other cheese?
We’ve provided a few paragraphs and some resources on each of the above, with the hope of getting you from wherever you are now to the point of being able to understand and productively contribute to what we’re working on. You don’t have to read them, but if you jump in on a meeting or even better are thinking of jumping in on a meeting, and you find it a bit hard to follow along, we hope the rest of this post serves to make the process as easy as possible. After all, we were all in your shoes just a short time ago ourselves!
How does biotech work?
Biotech is the science of using tools from nature to solve human problems. For the purpose of Real Vegan Cheese, we can limit ourselves to a small subset of these tools, namely proteins, bacteria, and fungi.
Proteins are molecular machines that make all of biology work. Just about anything a living thing can do, whether it’s moving, seeing, smelling, eating, or even thinking, is only possible because of proteins. As an example, our muscles use the proteins actin and myosin to actually do the moving, our eyes using proteins called opsins to turn light into signals for your brain, our mouths and stomachs use enzymes, a category of proteins, to break down the food we eat, and our brains use a modified protein called oxytocin to allow us to feel love.
If proteins are the base of all biology, we can take these proteins and either tweak them or invent our own to do things for us in countless industries. That’s where the bacteria and fungi come in. These organisms are really, really good at making proteins, and are the tools of choice for projects using biotechnology for recombinant protein production.
Vocab: A “recombinant protein” is a protein borrowed from nature, tweaked for form and function, and typically manufactured with microorganism, though plants are also occasionally used.
In the simplest sense, DNA — and RNA, its simpler equivalent — encode proteins, and are used by an organism to make proteins. If you can give an organism a piece of DNA or RNA for producing a given protein, under the right conditions, that organism will now produce the protein. If it happens to be a cheese protein, BOOM! You’ve got Real Vegan Cheese.
How does the science of cheese work?
Cheese is largely a product of a specific type of protein, casein. You may have heard of its use in protein powders for athletes. Casein, rather than being a single protein, is actually a group of them, four of which feature heavily in the properties of cheese. By name, these are the alpha-s1, alpha-s2, beta, and kappa caseins. You’ll also sometimes see these written using Greek letters as αs1-casein, αs2-casein, β-casein, and κ-casein, because scientists have an almost pathological obsession with Greek :)
Specifically, these proteins exist in milk to solve one very big problem for cows, which is that they need to give their young more calcium and phosphate than chemistry will allow to exist in water. Nature got clever, and invented the casein micelle, basically a microscopic cocoon that can trap huge amounts of calcium, phosphate, and other nutrients to solve the problem. These micelles are also designed to “curdle” in the stomachs of calves for more efficient digestion, which is gross for cows, but really helpful for humans!
People have been taking advantage of casein’s tendency for form micelles to make cheese for thousands of years, and all you really need to make cheese is the casein proteins and some fat. Milk also includes other proteins, and other chemical components beyond the proteins, but those either don’t make it into the cheese or ultimately contribute only minimally to its properties, and so can safely be neglected.
How is Real Vegan Cheese different from other cheese?
Whereas most cheese is made from casein proteins that come from milk, we use microorganisms to produce the same exact proteins for the same great gooey, stretchy, delicious cheese, without any cows involved. The fats the make up cheese can come from any number of plant sources, or can even be produced recombinantly as well, though cost will likely dictate the use of plant fats.
The process of using these microorganisms to do so is the focus of the project, though as of the time of this writing, there are plenty of other avenues of active research surrounding cheese, such as studying the genomics
Vocab: “Genomics” is a study similar to genetics, but concerns more specifically the entire genetic code, or “genome,” of an organism and how the interplay of genes reveals information about an organism’s evolution, place on the tree of life, the structure and function of various aspects of the organism, and various other outcomes. Genetics, on the other hand, is more focused on individual genes and effects they have on an organism, especially with regards to specific functions. Think microeconomics vs. macroeconomics, not a perfect parallel, but definitely close.