Beth Zotter and her team at Trophic LLC in Berkeley, Calif., are exploring the ocean’s depths to cultivate red seaweed as a viable, affordable source of plant-based protein.
In a lab at Clemson University in South Carolina, Dil Thavarajah is studying new cultivation methods to boost volumes of organic pulses and sorghum for use in plant-based meats.
And at UCLA, biophysicist Amy Rowat is applying her deep knowledge of cell behavior to develop a scaffolding that could be used to create more complex versions of lab-grown meat.
The researchers are three of the 14 selected by the Good Food Institute to share in a $3 million grant program designed to develop new technology and innovations in the area of plant-based and lab-grown meat.
The program, launched last September, sought promising early-stage research in both academic and private-sector spheres, and it aims to cultivate open-source innovations to further the growth of meat products made without using animals.
GFI received 66 applications from researchers in 18 countries, and selected eight in the plant-based category and six in the cell-based arena, said Erin Rees Clayton, GFI’s Scientific Foundations Liaison.
The recipients won grants up to $250,000, based on the budgets they submitted with their grant applications.
“We don’t see ourselves just as a source of money to these researchers,” Rees Clayton said. “We certainly hope our value can also come as tech advisers, with connections to other researchers and companies in this space. Our goal is to be involved as a helpful source during the course of the project.”
As demand for plant-based meat substitutes grows, companies need larger and more affordable sources of plant-based protein, and GFI was especially searching for projects in that area when it launched the grant program.
Thavarajah will be able to further the research she started with a $1 million grant from the U.S. Agriculture Department. The project involves growing organic field peas and sorghum in rotation, to develop organic sources of plant-based protein. She works with local farmers who are paid to grow the crops in rotation.
The GFI grant will go toward studying the quality of the proteins in the plants with an eye on creating affordable options to feed people in developing countries, she said. The focus is on organic because, currently, most of the plant-based proteins available to food makers are from conventional rather than organic crops. Developing organic plant-based protein sources will allow the creation of plant-based meats that can be certified organic.
Affordability is also a key goal in Zotter’s project. Her startup launched in 2017 with a plan to develop technology to cultivate red seaweed. Now, with the help of the grant, it will work on extracting protein from the aquatic plant and bringing down the cost of production.
“The challenges are mainly economics and producing a quality product,” she said. “It’s very challenging to make seaweed protein something that can compete as a food ingredient.”
There are some good reasons to pursue it, though. Plants need nitrogen to create protein, which is why legumes are such a good protein source because they supply their own nitrogen, she said.
“And the ocean is full of nitrogen. We see the ocean as a vast untapped reservoir of free and environmentally friendly fertilizer.”
Rowat has taken on a different challenge. A biophysicist by training, she became fascinated with cell behavior as a grad student and has spent years studying the different types of molecules responsible for the mechanical properties of cells.
She’s also passionate about food and about 15 years ago she created a class at Harvard that uses food and cooking to teach science, and she created a similar class that she teaches now at UCLA.
The two interests come together in her latest project.
“The clean meat project is really for us the study of mechanobiology and how we can tune it to create this complex system of cells needed to make marbled clean meat,” Rowat said.
Other projects accepted for the program include researchers at the University of Oslo in Norway who are developing a group of cell lines that can be used by companies developing lab-grown meat and a scientist in Estonia developing fermented oat protein.
The program launched as a one-time thing but GFI is hopeful it will be able to do more grants in the future.
“We are certainly working toward making it an ongoing program,” Rees Clayton said. “Currently there are so few funding opportunities specific to this area and we really believe programs like this can have a tremendous impact.”
