Hi Eshan! How are you doing on this very nice day? Thank you so much for awesome issue #115. I learned more about the process and difficulties of creating cultured food cells in this fantastic newsletter than I had previously known. Wow. I was a philosophy major at UCLA and went to law school. Thanks for staying on top of this great ' re-engineering evolution' development. Both NASA and ESA have recently sent super sophisticated spacecrafts, with incredibly complex trajectories to Jupiter's active moon, Europa. Now If humanity would invest the brainpower and resources into creating a real, sustainable cultured meat as we put into our amazing space probes, we would probably already have greatly reduced factory farming. But there is much headwind. Thank you very much for all you do to help educate your subs and helping to make the world a better place. Have a very nice and peaceful week Eshan. I appreciate you 🌞 ❤️
Hey, thank you for taking the time to leave this thoughtful note!
I love the analogy you drew with Europa missions, it’s a good reminder of how much human ingenuity can achieve when resources and willpower align. Cultured meat (and broader cellular agriculture) is facing that same mix of incredible promise and heavy headwinds, as you mentioned. I share your hope that more of that collective brainpower will shift toward building a sustainable food system.
I’m glad the piece clarified some of the science and challenges. Thanks again for your kind words and support, and I wish you a peaceful week as well! 🙂
This is excellent, thanks Eshan! What an encouraging technology. Is there any reason this couldn’t work with Cyanobacteria? Thinking of bloating high-lipid strains to dial up the production of oils, or even insulin production a la Cyanocapture.
Also, for any microbes that “beat” the addiction through mutation— is the idea to have those strains serve as case studies that could ultimately strengthen the addiction circuit?
Great questions, thank you. I should preface my response by saying it is based on my understanding, which might be incorrect!
In principle, yes, product-coupled “addiction” can be ported to cyanobacteria, but I think it is harder in practice. Cyanobacteria are typically polyploid, so replacing an essential gene’s promoter across all genome copies takes time and careful selection. Their light-driven, circadian physiology also means promoter behaviour and burden look different under changing light, redox and oxygen.
On the escape question: Yes, you treat escapees as signals, not failure. Teams typically deep-sequence escape lineages to map the routes out, then harden the design, for example, by reducing promoter leak, moving to intracellular intermediates, adding redundancy with multi-locus or multi-signal gating, recoding to remove repeats and mobile-element hotspots, or tying survival to more than one essential function.
Hi Eshan! How are you doing on this very nice day? Thank you so much for awesome issue #115. I learned more about the process and difficulties of creating cultured food cells in this fantastic newsletter than I had previously known. Wow. I was a philosophy major at UCLA and went to law school. Thanks for staying on top of this great ' re-engineering evolution' development. Both NASA and ESA have recently sent super sophisticated spacecrafts, with incredibly complex trajectories to Jupiter's active moon, Europa. Now If humanity would invest the brainpower and resources into creating a real, sustainable cultured meat as we put into our amazing space probes, we would probably already have greatly reduced factory farming. But there is much headwind. Thank you very much for all you do to help educate your subs and helping to make the world a better place. Have a very nice and peaceful week Eshan. I appreciate you 🌞 ❤️
Hey, thank you for taking the time to leave this thoughtful note!
I love the analogy you drew with Europa missions, it’s a good reminder of how much human ingenuity can achieve when resources and willpower align. Cultured meat (and broader cellular agriculture) is facing that same mix of incredible promise and heavy headwinds, as you mentioned. I share your hope that more of that collective brainpower will shift toward building a sustainable food system.
I’m glad the piece clarified some of the science and challenges. Thanks again for your kind words and support, and I wish you a peaceful week as well! 🙂
This is excellent, thanks Eshan! What an encouraging technology. Is there any reason this couldn’t work with Cyanobacteria? Thinking of bloating high-lipid strains to dial up the production of oils, or even insulin production a la Cyanocapture.
Also, for any microbes that “beat” the addiction through mutation— is the idea to have those strains serve as case studies that could ultimately strengthen the addiction circuit?
Great questions, thank you. I should preface my response by saying it is based on my understanding, which might be incorrect!
In principle, yes, product-coupled “addiction” can be ported to cyanobacteria, but I think it is harder in practice. Cyanobacteria are typically polyploid, so replacing an essential gene’s promoter across all genome copies takes time and careful selection. Their light-driven, circadian physiology also means promoter behaviour and burden look different under changing light, redox and oxygen.
On the escape question: Yes, you treat escapees as signals, not failure. Teams typically deep-sequence escape lineages to map the routes out, then harden the design, for example, by reducing promoter leak, moving to intracellular intermediates, adding redundancy with multi-locus or multi-signal gating, recoding to remove repeats and mobile-element hotspots, or tying survival to more than one essential function.
Had to ask about the cyanos 😅 Thanks for the thoughtful response!
Would expect nothing less from you 😎