A replacement for vegetable oil made using microbes

Vegetable oils are common because they are convenient and useful. But the processes that produce them are wasteful, contributing significantly to deforestation in tropical regions. And vegetable oils are often unhealthy – contributing as much as one fifth of the calories we consume.

Now, US startup Zero Acre Farms is developing a promising alternative. The company is harnessing a well-known natural process that is more readily associated with alcohol production: fermentation. This process involves feeding microbes that, in turn, produce a useful by-product. Fermentation has many applications across industries, and microbes are carefully chosen for what they produce. In the case of brewing, the chosen microbe—yeast—produces ethanol. For the Zero Acre Farms process microbes are chosen that produce oil and fat.

The end-product is an oil that can be used in place of vegetable oils.

ESM