Animal agriculture is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Precision fermentation enables the production of bovine milk proteins without dairy cows, which should be more sustainable environmentally and meet the demands of a growing global population. However, key milk proteins are highly phosphorylated and the number of positions of these phosphates modulates their function. Thus, this project will result in a high throughput platform for screening thousands of microbial strains and precision fermentation conditions to identify those producing correctly phosphorylated proteins. Selected phosphoproteins will undergo further quality control testing, including dairy product prototyping and digestibility studies, to identify promising new precision fermented dairy products.
