CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat
94 comments
·December 12, 2025dbcooper
meindnoch
Finally vegans can get gout too!
gsf_emergency_6
recent study that genetics has a underappreciated role in gout
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...
anotherpaul
While the paper is behind a pay wall, the abstract highlights that they used knock out gene editing, meaning this is not a GMO of the old days, with trans genes, but a mkdifcation one could have achieved with classical breeding if given enough time and resources.
If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
aydyn
Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources. Thats what evolution is afterall. Using CRISPR but not labelling it as genetically modified seems pretty wild, but then again EU does have some funky regulations.
fsckboy
>Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources.
not in a meaningful way, no. the probability that a new mutation you want will occur is much much lower than the probability you can breed offspring without a gene that's already in the bloodline.
viciousvoxel
Once a desirable sequence modification is identified through artificial means, what is often done in practice is to simply expose samples of the organism to UV until the desired sequence appears "naturally." The output of this process is not typically considered GMO, at least for regulatory purposes.
SapporoChris
They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn utilizes in its products. "The production process of gene-edited MP is more environmentally friendly than chicken meat and cell-cultured meat." That's good news, if they get to the point where it is more economically friendly than chicken meat it will be great news.
Flere-Imsaho
I would love to eat meat free alternatives. Quorn gives me IBS. Same with the highly processed meat free "meat". Beans are my basic goto for protein plus eggs.
ggm
I was coming to write about Quorn. I wondered if it was in the family because Quorn is an industrialised bioreactor process. This should translate over, unless weakened cell walls make for a process unfriendly change.
buu700
Neurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.
shrubble
There’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.
tdb7893
A negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is referencing how they are actually produced, which is generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of thousands to millions of birds a year).
swiftcoder
Back of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time.
That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
literalAardvark
That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.
They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.
vintermann
If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same.
At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
_dark_matter_
Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
truekonrads
This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
Certhas
If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect.
In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
johanvts
Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
asterix_pano
That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
exe34
how big is your backyard?
chasil
I had vaguely remembered that chitin was equivalent to cellulose in our inability to digest. The article addresses it:
"The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase, resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."
This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
aitchnyu
Fish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage.
for humans, does shellfish allergy (tropomyosin and other proteins) diagnosis imply chitin allergy?
boxed
> This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
How?
curtisf
By replacing (some) farmed meat with farmed fungi protein.
Although it's theoretically possible for a disease to infect both fungus and animals, because the biology is so different, the risk is greatly, greatly reduced.
In addition, it may be possible to reduce the use of treatments such as antibiotics which, in their currently mass application to farmed animals, could directly lead to the development of antibiotic resistant in diseases which affect humans and animals.
brnt
Plus, chucking the contents of a few biotanks in case of infection is a hell of a lot better than having to kill and waste millions of birds.
I mean, industrial slaughter isn't a pretty process, even in better plants, which most aren't, but where they come to wipe out the barn, they're not putting animal welfare first.
torginus
This sounds like they took a product that failed in the market - fungus based meat substitutes, and hinted at some superscience magic thats years from coming out, and that's if it proves safe, economical and a genunie improvement.
This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
andrelaszlo
Quorn is based on fungus. I'm not a huge fan of it myself but it's sold across the EU, and it's in almost all stores where I live.
vintermann
This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is really targeted at.
literalAardvark
Not necessarily.
It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.
padjo
I’ve seen very little that isn’t just correlation of highly processed food consumption and generally poor lifestyle
literalAardvark
Here, this is a solid intro you can thread out of at your leisure. There's really no controversy around this at a scientific level, only on social media:
cregy
This! Would love if we spent some of that sweet AI money into engineered new food sources. I've been watching Soylent for a while now. Food that can be made in space is what we need for interplanetary travel. Qudos to this crispr research!
anotherpaul
The paper linked in the article: https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-779...
airstrike
Classic belter fare
ITniggah
That's what she said.
metalman
"Chicken of the woods", Hen of the woods?, whatever, shelf fungus, grows on dieing hardwoods, often in huge quantities, cooks like chicken, looks like chicken, tastes like chicken, but costs more unless you can gather it yourself.It also lasts for weeks on top of the fridge, but there must be ways to keep it longer.
westmeal
Probably tastes better than this stuff. My mother is super into mushroom foraging and made some for me with garlic and some herbal salt and while I don't think it tastes quite like chicken, it's definitely pretty damn good.
SilentM68
When I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
brnt
That would make for a great spinoff: farm the infected for food!
Bad_Initialism
The association is undiminshed by their web server being down. Uh oh.
A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...