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Copy file name to clipboardExpand all lines: _posts/2022-01-14-quorn-a-story-about-single-cell-protein.md
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@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ Growing *F. venenatum* in a liquid culture is fairly straightforward. Like other
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This can be accomplished with any bioreactor design, but after two iterations, the design team eventually opted for an **external-loop airlift bioreactor**[4-7] that looks a bit like a Klein bottle from mathematics:
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The *F. venenatum* biomass has a nucleic acid content of around 8-9% w/w dry basis which is too high for human consumption. To solve this problem, the biomass is heated to 68°C for 15+ minutes, and endogenous RNAases break down cellular RNA into 5'-ribonucleotides, which diffuse out of the cell. But this comes at a cost - over 30% of the biomass is also lost in the process. This heating process causes some components of the hyphae to leak out into the surroundings.
Luckily, some 5'-ribonucleotides are potent umami compounds and synergistic with glutamate. The producers of Quorn concentrate this liquid and sell it as a flavour enhancer.
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This isn't actually a problem for biomass production, but the branched mutation has an inferior texture to the more linear parent. The goal of Quorn is to simulate meat-like fibres which require linear hyphae.
And so, at around 1000h (6 weeks) of operation, the reactor is shut down to be re-seeded with a new culture. For all practical purposes, this is good enough: resetting the reactor at such long intervals is an insignificant loss in productivity and the operators would need a window to clean and perform maintenance anyways.
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Although it was difficult to piece together the mass balance, since process details tend to only be available to plant operators and engineers, I could piece together a decent estimate by combining several sources [4-10] and my own assumptions:
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A food products' **organoleptic properties** matter a lot in the meat substitute space. Quorn's success comes in part due to the fact the the hyphal product, after heat treatment and freezing, resembles the fibrous texture of meat.
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