Real Vegan Cheese - in person lab work

The Real Vegan Cheese project is back at the bench. Join us on alternating Mondays at 7pm (check meetup.com/biocurious/events/) for in-person in-lab workshops at BioCurious. You do not need any prior experience or knowledge to join. This event is in the laboratory space, and properly safe attire is required (closed-toed shoes, long pants).

Work will likely involve things like yeast strain handling, transformation, culturing, plasmid cloning, PCR, electrophoresis, protein expression, and SDS-PAGE gels. Eventually, we hope to get closer to scaling up production in bioreactors.

The Real Vegan Cheese (https://realvegancheese.org/) project is an award-winning collaboration between BioCurious and our sister lab Counter Culture Labs (http://counterculturelabs.org/) in Oakland, to make real cheese without using any animals!

This grassroots, non-profit research project explores the technology of cellular agriculture by adding the genes for cheese proteins into yeast and other microflora. This turns the yeast into little protein factories, and we aim to use these as a basis to make real cheese by adding plant-based fats and sugars. We call the project "real" vegan cheese because this is not a cheese substitute -- the proteins are the same and so we aim to use the same cheesemaking techniques as you would with cow or goat milk. Additionally, we can explore making cheese from proteins from other mammals that are difficult to milk. We are dedicated to Open Science and making sure the results of our research are available to the global community to enable a sustainable animal-free dairy industry.