About the project

• Background

  Secure and sustainable production of enough protein-rich food is essential for all human societies. In this project called MetaFeed the possibility of using microorganisms as food and feed is explored. In particular, it is investigated if protein can be produced efficiently from methanol using novel bacteria. This would decouple protein production from agriculture since methanol is an industrial chemical that may be produced from CO2 and renewable electricity. The primary objective of the project is to develop efficient processes for producing protein-rich microbial biomass from methanol for feed applications. To achieve this, the following secondary objectives need to be met:

  1) Identify novel bacteria that can grow on methanol

  2) Develop bioprocesses in bioreactors with high productivities and high cell densities

  3) Optimize microbial biomass composition for specific feed applications by tuning process conditions

  4) Obtain detailed characterization of produced microbial biomass and evaluate feed applications

  5) Develop downstream processes to prepare the biomass for specific feed applications

  6) TEA of selected value chains for methanol-based feed production in Norway.

  Thus, this is a project that studies the use of novel microbial cultivation technology for production of feed proteins in bioreactors. Central topics are microbiology, bioprocess technology, processing of microbial biomass, detailed characterization microbial biomass composition, and evaluation of the suitability of these microbes as protein ingredient in salmon- and chicken feed.

• Objectives

• Publications

Participants

• NMBU team

• Outside collaborators