Blog posts

Alternative proteins – a bite for the environment

Have you noticed the appearance of a new section in supermarkets in the last few years? I am talking about the ‘protein’ shelves. Proteins are essential macronutrients that support growth, development and repair. Dietary recommendations in the UK suggest adults should consume at least 45 (female) and 55.5 (males) grams of protein per day. However, animal meat is the main source of protein in our diets, and its production is one of the largest contributors to climate change. We need new sources of protein to keep up with demand and we need them to be sustainable, healthy and resilient. How can molecular engineering help with that?

Supermarkets shelves showing whey protein products.
Supermarkets shelves showing whey protein products. Image credit: Flickr, Sekihan.

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Not a drop in the ocean, households’ potential to reduce carbon emissions

Travelling by public transport, recycling our home waste, using re-fillable water bottles or taking a tote bag to the supermarket. We have all heard about the little changes we can do to reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment. However, the action with the biggest impact is related to food!

Project Drawdown has identified a series of practices and technologies with direct effect on emissions that are scientifically validated and economically viable.

A drop in the ocean?

Their analysis revealed that household activities could contribute to avoid dangerous climate change, defined as an increase in global temperature larger than 1.5°C. Individual actions have the potential to reduce the total emissions needed to avoid that temperature increase by 25-30%. Definitely not just a drop in the ocean! While large businesses and governments are responsible for most emissions (70-75%), our choices also play an important part.

How can we help?

Among the 20-high impact actions we find better home insulation, public transport and recycling. But above all, adopting a plant-rich diet and reducing food waste make up 12.4% of the 25-30% household potential for reductions. Adapting our diet and reducing the food we buy but don’t eat could really make a difference.

Top 20 high impact climate actions for households and individuals.
Top 20 high impact climate actions for households and individuals. Image credit: Project Drawdown.

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Sustainable flavourings

Our guest blogger, Mia Hughes is back to explore the topic of sustainable flavourings using chemical biology.

Grapefruit flavouring is in high demand around the world, for use in cakes, sweets, ice-cream and more. I myself consider a glass of grapefruit juice a refreshing treat. However, you may not know that grapefruit flavouring is actually one of the most expensive to produce in the world. This all comes down to the chemical compound Nootkatone, which gives grapefruit its flavour. A staggering 400,000 Kgs of Grapefruit are used to produce just 1 Kg of Nootkatone. This makes it hard to naturally source and in short supply. Researchers at Oxford Biotrans have responded to this issue by developing a new, sustainable way to produce Nootkatone – from oranges!

From left to right: lemon, orange and grapefruit slices.
Lemon, orange and grapefruit. Image credit: Marco Verch

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DNA, the blueprint and concrete of biological engineers

What concrete is to civil engineers, DNA is to biological engineers. At first glance, DNA might seem like any other material, a building block, like concrete. A material that, over time, humans learnt to refine, assemble, and optimize into products with specific functions. This analogy, brought to us by our guest blogger, MRes student Emile Durand, captures the essence of biological engineering’s approach. But to fully understand the potential of this topic, we must first learn what makes DNA different from other building blocks! 

DNA model, divided into blocks
DNA model as building blocks. Image credit: Study.com

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New year resolution: building bridges across disciplines

The time has come to make new year resolutions! You could aim to learn a new skill, technique or perhaps embrace a new discipline? How about starting a new collaboration with a researcher in a different field? Or expanding research beyond the lab into industry applications and policy recommendations?

If these ideas have crossed your mind, then your new resolution could be to embrace a multi, inter and/or transdisciplinary research approach so solve grand challenges.

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Quantum computing to untangle (or rather, entangle?) protein folding

It might take time, but with your list of clues you would probably be able to piece together your Lego set eventually. But in the case of protein folding, no supercomputer is powerful enough to make any significant advancement on its own. That’s where quantum computers come into play. 

Manya Bhargava returns to the IMSE blog to continue exploring the protein folding problem. In her previous blog, she explained how AlphaFold (AI system) uses known structures to predict the structures of unknown proteins. However, any AI system relies heavily on experimentally obtained data. On this new blog entry, Manya explains how quantum computers help to advance the problem by providing new solutions.

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Predicting protein structures and building Legos

We welcome back guest blogger, Manya Bhargava, to explain this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize, awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, for the development of AlphaFold! Developed by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI, AlphaFold is an AI system that predicts protein structures.

Imagine you’ve just bought a new Lego set. You’re super excited to get started. You have the pieces arranged, and all you need are the instructions to tell you how to fit them together. But someone seems to have played an awful prank on you. Instead of instructions in the box, you find a long list of clues about how the blocks need to fit together. Blue blocks can only connect to yellow ones, flat bricks can only be on the top… and so on. You know what the final model should look like, but this sure makes it much harder to build!

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The rise of cultivated meat II: beyond cell culture

In our previous blog (Future of Food: Exploring the Rise of Cultivated Meat), guest bloggers, Wynsee Lu and Mekumi Chan, told us about the potential of cultivated meat as a sustainable food option. As they read articles on the topic, they discovered this industry goes beyond standard cell culture. In fact, there are a lot of additional aspects to consider for cultivated meat. Lab-grown meat is a great example of how we need to have molecular understanding to effectively engineer new products. In this blog, they explore the diversity in this industry and its potential for growth.

The molecular origin of flavour

For consumers, the most important sensory characteristics of cultivated meats are the taste and texture compared to real meat. The main way industries have attempted to achieve the natural taste of meat within this sustainable food option is by mimicking the Maillard reaction. The Maillard reaction is the natural process that normal meats undergo when browning under heat to bring out aromas and flavours. Simultaneous chemical reactions between the amino acids and reducing sugars in the meat achieve the desired outcome. To mimic this, researchers use a temperature-sensitive flavour-switchable scaffold to enhance the aromatic properties of cultivated meats. This scaffold “switches on’ while cooking and the chemical reactions within it release crucial flavours to appease consumers. This is not the only way to reproduce the flavours of real meat and industries are developing new methods every day.

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Future of Food: Exploring the Rise of Cultivated Meat

Over the summer, IMSE welcomes undergraduate students to spend a day working side to side with our Operations team. They help us explore new topics in the field of molecular science and engineering and design outreach activities. In August, Wynsee Lau (Medical Biosciences undergraduate) and Mekumi Chan (Biological Sciences undergraduate) combined their interest in scientific research and public engagement to write a blog. They chose to write about the exciting potential of the cultivated meat field and situated it in the context of a well known event, the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Aiming for a gold medal in sustainability at the Olympics games

As we enjoy the last month of summer, the most memorable event of this season has to be the Paris Olympics. Whether it was memorable because of the unique opening ceremony, I’m sure we’ve all seen some TikTok of the Olympic village and Paris’ attempt for a more ‘sustainable’ games. One of Paris’ approaches was to half the amount of animal products compared to any other Olympics. Instead of meat, they introduce more plant-based foods.  This decision led to a decrease in carbon emissions; however, there were also complaints from some of the athletes.  What can future Olympic hosts do to cut down these alarming carbon emissions whilst also fueling the athletes with the appropriate nutrients needed? In the growing industry of biotechnology, many startups are investigating the possibility of growing meat in the lab. 

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3D printed sculpture, microscope or both?

If you had access to a 3D printer, what would you print? Something fun, something useful? How about both?

Alex Christopherson, a final year undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London and David Samuel, an artist based in Park Royal Design Studios, collaborated to create a 3D printed sculpture that doubles as a microscope and allows you to see a 3D printed Queens Tower 100,000 times smaller than the real one! Engineering and art coming together to 3D print a sculpture.

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