Fungal fermentation for food protein production in upcycled agro-industrial side-streams

There is an increasing demand for proteins due to the human population rise and increase in living standards. At the same time, animal production has a huge negative climate impact and demand for agricultural land for feed production. This calls for a shift in the dietary pattern towards more sustainable food sources with better utilization of the arable land to sustain feeding the population without further burdening the environment. Due to their efficient biomass degradation apparatus, filamentous fungi are excellent organisms to retrieve nutrients from complex material. Thereby they have the capacity to upcycle agro-industrial side-streams into food proteins. The production of food proteins can be carried out using native strains or engineered strains to produce multiple proteins or to produce specific secreted proteins in highly specialized fungal hosts. Production of proteins is carried out in Solid State Fermentation (SSF) and Submerged Fermentation (SmF) where SmF is based on easily fermentable sugar streams. These sugars can come from 1. generation processes or pre-treated and hydrolyzed 2. generation biomasses, whereas SSF can utilize substrates without pre-treatment. The fermentation substrates are often considered among the most important components in the cost of the fermentation products, which usually can account for almost 50% of the whole production process. Thus, to lower the costs of production for lower value products that need to be produced in high amounts such as food proteins, the search for cheaper sources of fermentation substrate has high priority for the industry. We are working on upcycling of low-cost side-streams from the food- and agro-industry and adapting these streams to specific fungal production hosts as alternative cheap and sustainable fermentation substrates in the production of alternative proteins for the food industry in SSF and SmF.