Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Development of an eco-sustainable biotechnological process for product...
Coordinator
New breeding techniques like genome editing will be used to produce customised safety food and to generate lines with an improved nutritional profile covering both compounds with beneficial properties and reducing anti-nutritional components. Biotechnological processes will be used to eliminate toxic compounds to produce new food/beverages from novel substrates. Tailored (bio)technological approaches will be set up to valorise alternative protein sources (i.e., cricket powder, micro- and macro-algae, single cell proteins, and yeast biomasses, agri-food and fishery by-products, insect-based foods. Set- up of a safe system of cellular agriculture for the development of novel food, like cultured meat and cheese in connection with Spoke 2 and 4)
Protocol for the development of novel and innovative food/beverages (M36)
Development of cultured meat and cheese products and identification of safety risks in production process (M36)
The global population growth and the high pressure on resources is expected to double in the coming decades, with a growing demand of sustainable proteins of animal origin, especially meat and fish but also dairy products. In 2012, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that global demand for meat is expected to reach 455 million tons by 2050, an increase of 76% from 2005(FAO, 2020). One of the world’s most pressing challenges is to produce meat, fish and dairy products in a way that reduces their environmental impacts.
Cellular agriculture consists in producing food products, such as meat, from individual cells with the priority to manufacture products comparable to traditional products. The cellular agriculture technology has been previously considered for space applications. Cultured meat and fish are already produced by several start-up but the technology, methods, procedure, and identification of safety risks are not published, nor available in scientific literature.
The activities will focus on:
In order to develop protocols to produce cell-based novel food, the expected results of the proposal will be:
