Consumers demand sustainable and healthier food ingredients to replace the chemical additives that we can’t even pronounce. Among these are the preservatives, texturizers, and emulsifiers that are buried deep in the ingredients label. The alternative is to find and produce proteins to replace these chemicals, but the bottleneck is the identification and design.

Protera Biosciences is advancing the science of protein engineering to address critical challenges in food, agriculture, the environment, and human health. They have a database containing billions of protein sequences from GRAS organisms, and screen them for the top variants, which are then produced in using yeast fermentation. Protera is optimizing the full protein engineering process, from design to testing and development of a proof of concept in less 3 months. Their antifungal protein (patent pending) has already been shown to prevent bread mold for more than a month, and are already scaling this up for commercial production.