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Cultivated, Cell-Cultured & Biotechnology

10 Molecular Farming Startups Transforming Everyday Plants into Protein Powerhouses

Today, we bring you a roundup of molecular farming startups transforming plants into biofactories to produce alternatives to animal proteins, pigments, next-gen sweeteners, and growth factors. Plant molecular farming, an additional production approach to plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation, promises unlimited and cost-effective ingredients for food and other industries. Since it doesn’t require expensive infrastructure and bioreactors — only the magic of plants and bioengineering —  existing greenhouses and fields can become ingredient factories, ensuring a straightforward industrial scale-up and competitive prices. Each of the following startups has chosen a plant as its production facility: 1. VelozBio, Mexico: Discarded  fruits VelozBio, a startup based in Monterrey founded in 2020,  claims to have developed the world’s fastest protein design and development platform. VelozBio produces high-value proteins, including casein, by expressing target …

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Motif FoodWorks Burger with HEMAMI

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Company News

Motif FoodWorks Partners with IngredientWerks to Explore Creating Animal-Free Heme From Corn

Food tech startup Motif FoodWorks announces it is partnering with IngredientWerks, an agtech ingredients company, to develop high-value plant-based proteins for the alt-protein market. Through the research partnership, the two companies say they will explore new ways to optimize heme protein production through molecular farming.  According to Motif, the partners have begun an exploratory study aimed at recreating Motif’s HEMAMI™ ingredient using corn. HEMAMI is used to give plant-based meats the same flavor and aroma as animal-based meat, and is said to be bioidentical to the bovine heme protein found in beef. IngredientWerks will aim to produce Motif’s HEMAMI using broad-acre crops such as corn. If successful, Motif says enabling crop protein production in its ingredient strategy will lower both production costs and the carbon footprint …

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