The other day I was asking for some specific fermentation products for a customer. Some of the answers I received pointed me to bioreactor products attempting tp produce animal and plant proteins using animal-free technology. Remarkable technology. But that is not what I was looking for! My customer was interested in a Tempeh-type of a product, roughly speaking.

Tempeh is an Indonesian product made by natural and controlled fermention of soy beans using fungus of Rhizopus Sp to bind soybeans into a cake form

Biotechnology has afforded mankind the most powerful tools to improve protein supply and quality. Additionally, the age-old art (and science) of fermentation used to produce cheese, beer and sour dough bread is perhaps as old as the Bible (mentioned in 2 Samuel 17:29).

I won’t mention wine, that is well known and we all know what happened somewhere in Canan when water-turned-into-wine! At the risk of this thesis being considered a religious proselytisation, I am tempted to refer to Ezekiel 4v9:

Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof.

Looking at that recipe, one can’t help but notice the immense supply of proteins in that bread! That is fermentation. From beer, wine, bread, mursik (kefir), cheese to yoghurt.

But what is fermentation, you may posit!

Fermentation or Pharmentation?

The word “ferment” comes from the Latin verb “fervere,” which means “to boil.” Certainly, fermentation is NOT anywhere closer to “boiling”.

It is generally agreed that fermentation is a metabolic process involving the biochemical activity of organisms, during their growth, development, reproduction, even senescence and death. During the process, microbial enzymes convert various substrates to important products. Uses range from preservation (sauerkraut) to flavour development (soy sauce).

There is, generally, an agreement in biotechnology to categorise fermentation processes into two: traditional or “solid state” fermentation (SSF) and “precision” fermentation. The former (SSF), is a biomolecule manufacturing process used in the pharma, food, cosmetic and textile industries and involves mostly products generated by microorganisms grown on a solid support. Liquid or submerged fermentation is used predominantly for industrial purposes to produce

On the other hand, the Good Food Institute (GFI) defines precision fermentation as

the uses microbial hosts as “cell factories” for producing specific functional ingredients. These ingredients typically require greater purity than the primary protein ingredients and are incorporated at much lower levels. 

Currently, there is a lot of confusion in the alternative protein arena.

Obviously I wasn’t going to get what I was asking for unless I offered this explanation: I am looking for legumes or pulses product that have been modified through the action of fermentation to reduce or remove antinutritionals or modify their flavour.

This got me thinking: There are words that were coined like “pharming”

Britannica defines it as “the generation of pharmaceuticals using animals or plants that have been genetically engineered. Pharming is a useful alternative to traditional pharmaceutical development because genetically engineered livestock and plants are relatively inexpensive to produce and maintain”.

I know that pharming is also used loosely with phishing to refer to cyber-attacks. But that is not the use anticipated in this discussion.

Therefore, I would like to propose that in order to disambiguate between traditional fermentation (used to produce fermented foods like sauerkraut, yoghurt, mursik, cheese, beer and sauerdough bread), and the current application of biotechnology to produce alternative proteins

We should consider using “pharmentation” to refer to the “process in which biotechnology tools, including genetic engineering, are applied to deploy microbes to produce specific proteins and other useful biomolecules for pharmaceutical, feed, cosmetic, and food application“.

Such proteins as currently produced using fungi (e.g. animal free milk proteins, animal free meat proteins and animal free lipids) would fit into this category.

Examples of “pharmented” proteins would include Perfect Day’s dairy proteins or Formo’s milk, The EVERY Company (formerly Clara Foods) egg proteins, and Impossible Foods’ heme protein or Mushlabs who grow mushrooms to generate proteins for altenative meat industry. This includes the production of mycoproteins as well. I leave it to you to decide where biomass fermentation in which the microbial biomass is allowed to proliferate, then converted to products as done by Quorn and Meati which use of filamentous fungi. I would like to call that “pharmentation” as well.

Unless of course you consider that as “pharming”!

When asking for fermented proteins, it shall be easy.

Fermented proteins shall be understood to mean proteins from plant and animal origin that are mixed with selected strains of fungi and bacteria in order to degrade anti-nutritionals, convert starch and sugars to short-chain sugars and fatty acids and largely keep the proteins intact.

That is by no means a conclusive description of the complex biochemical process that goes on. In our pursuit to serve customers demanding special modifications to proteins to meet nutritional and technofunctional needs, we look for the proteins whose biochemical compositions have been modified through the preferable degradation of undesirable (or less desirable) components or formation of (non-protein) new products of degredation that confer a taste or aroma benefit to the resulting product.

Major sources of plant-based proteins and modification approaches): Image credits Nasrabadi et al (2021)

Introducing pharmentation as a term that refers to the “synthesis” of biomolecules, especially (alternative) proteins, it shall save us the confusion of having to clarify that we did NOT mean to ask for animal-free proteins obtained through cell-culture, or harvested from genetically modified microbes that release them to the pharmentation media.

Sinonin Biotech defines Pharmentation, on the other hand to refer to deployment of the science of over-expression of amino acids, proteins, fatty acids or lipids using microbial cell factories.

We expect to see spin-offs like “pharmenters“, being specific bioreactors used to produce biomolecules using microbial cell factories et cetera.

About Sinonin Biotech. We are a family owned startup working in the alternative proteins and palatant innovation space to help businesses scout, source, test and innovate using alternative proteins and palatability or flavour enhancers. WWe work with Plant proteins, insect proteins, vegan palatants and enzymes.