Mold offers nutritious, sustainable meat replacement

UF Health Podcasts

Picture this: You sit down at a gourmet restaurant. The candelight is warm. The atmosphere is posh. And your dinner plate holds the entrée that’s been the talk of the town — an array of vegetables, carefully seasoned around the piece de resistance: mold.

Before the record screech, let’s clarify: We mean the humble mushroom. In a recent study, researchers at UC Berkeley have been fiddling with genes in koji mold, the substance used in East Asia to ferment different starches into consumables like sake, soy sauce and miso for hundreds of years.

Using gene editing software, researchers are tweaking the fungus to contain nutritional traits commonly found in meat — like increasing the production of heme [heem], an iron-based molecule most plentiful in animal tissues, and what gives most meat its unique taste. The scientists also boosted the koji mold’s ability to produce an antioxidant unique to fungi that is associated with a healthy cardiovascular system, giving the fungi the best of both worlds.

Though more work is needed, the study points to fungi as an easy-to-grow protein source that doesn’t require a laundry list of fillers and other ingredients commonly found in many existing meat substitutes. It also demonstrates the improvements in the field of synthetic biology as a whole, highlighting the profound impact a gene-editing software like CRISPR-Cas9 [Crisper-Kaz-9], the one used in the study, can have on future research.

Now, eating a mushroom patty may never be quite the same as chowing down on a medium-rare burger, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. At this rate, it’s possible that soon, you might not even notice the difference.