The CU-Boulder iGEM team intends to find the new whey to get cow milk. Cow milk can be found in 92% of all homes in the United States (Stewart et al.). This product comes from 9.38 million cows located in the United States and each of these cows belches approximately 220 pounds of methane into the atmosphere each year (Quinton). Methane is found to be 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) in trapping heat within the atmosphere, thus cows are significant and harmful contributors to climate change (Nations). With cows being the source of one of the most popular foods in the United States as well as one of the top producers of greenhouse gas, it would be greatly beneficial to the climate change crisis to find an alternative way to produce cow milk. Alpha-lactalbumin and Beta-lactoglobulin make up 70-80% of whey proteins that are found in cow milk (Wang et al.). Our team hopes that by being able to produce each component of cow milk in a soybean will allow for a chemically identical cow's milk to be constructed from soybeans. By producing milk proteins in efficiently farmed soybeans, the CU-Boulder team hopes to provide a sustainable and relatively inexpensive method of producing cow milk for household consumption while eliminating the cruel practice of dairy farming.
Additionally, the CU-Boulder iGEM team has also been working on a reporter that works best in our engineered system, RUBY. Because RUBY is present in our transgenic construct, visible expression of RUBY indicates that our transgene has been integrated into the genome of the soybean in that location. The picture below, taken from last year's results, shows the RUBY expression.
References
- Nations, United. “Causes and Effects of Climate Change.” United Nations, United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/causes-effects-climate-change. Accessed 18 June 2023.
- Quinton, Amy. “Cows and Climate Change.” UC Davis, 27 June 2019, https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable.
- Stewart, Hayden, et al. “Are Plant-Based Analogues Replacing Cow’s Milk in the American Diet?” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, vol. 52, no. 4, Nov. 2020, pp. 562–79. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2020.16.
- Wang, Qian, et al. “Insights from Alpha-Lactoalbumin and Beta-Lactoglobulin into Mechanisms of Nanoliposome-Whey Protein Interactions.” Food Hydrocolloids, vol. 125, Apr. 2022, p. 107436. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodhyd.2021.107436.