With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein – algae.

The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of the most commercially available algal species are rich in protein which supports muscle remodeling in young healthy adults.

  • TDCN@feddit.dk
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    11 months ago

    I guess the production could take inspiration from the pharma industry and use strict increasingly clean zones and sterile environments the closer you get to the core production. After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely. And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.

    • Francisco@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Keeping things sterile is very labour and energy intensive, even in the Pharma industry, where the profit margins are orders of magnitude above what you can do in the food industry.

      Look this will sound harsh, but it’s not, really.

      Your reasoning is good if you compare it to an hypothesis a student of Pasteur or Koch could have thought of 150 yrs ago.

      Thus I have to ask you, why did you think you have a good take on this?

      • TDCN@feddit.dk
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        11 months ago

        Did you read what i wrote? i said “take inspiration from” not "should copy 1:1 also i work i pharma so yes i have a good take on this.

        • fukhueson@lemmy.worldOP
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          11 months ago

          When you’re working with coproducts like algae-derived pharmaceuticals (see Lumen biotech in Seattle) that sell for 6 figures/kg you’re correct, much more stringent pharma-like ideas do get implemented because the down time is costly. This is seen in indoor reactor setups where you can grow under artificial light year round. Outdoors, the cost to implement more sophisticated systems doesn’t translate in your TEA especially when growing things like protein which is cheap in comparison.

          • TDCN@feddit.dk
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            11 months ago

            Yeah you are probably right that cost will be the biggest issue when comparing between the two fields of production. Getting a good stable production that is also cheap enough to be viable is always the hurdle

        • Francisco@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          What you said on the 1st sentence is okay. After that, is clueless. …in the context of discussing the difficulties - technical and economical - of growing specific algae for food.

          After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely.

          This is like saying that if there’s sun and no clouds, in theory, the sky should be blue. In practice there’s no useful information added to the discussion on the…

          And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.

          Like in all that is microbiology, kind of. Except steam is not sterilising. Unless under autoclave pressures. Inside an autoclave. Even in those conditions, which are agreed to be sterilising, even then not all microbes are killed and contamination is still considered as an issue in some cases. Again, in practice there’s no useful information added to the discussion on the…

          Your non-expert overconfidence is not unique. It’s an epidemic. And that’s why I’m triggered to comment on it.

          • TDCN@feddit.dk
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            11 months ago

            Again, in practice there’s no useful information added to the discussion on the

            And by that logic neither have you added anything useful so far with two long posts in this thread. So I guess we are even now? :)