Q. Why is it called “fermentation” in the first place?

A. Ferment/fermentation are words that predate the modern study of microbiology. They refer to the bubbling and rising activities we are familiar with in leavened bread dough, or the bubbles of gas when making beer, wine, or pickles. These are processes people have been using for thousands of years – fermentation is nothing new! The definition in modern biochemistry refers to breaking down carbohydrates or sugar to release energy without oxygen. However, the definitions of food fermentation and industrial fermentation are far broader, relating to using microbes to change or modify a food, or using microbes to manufacture useful products.

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Q. What is precision fermentation?

A. Precision fermentation is a subset of industrial fermentation, using engineered microbial strains to produce a specific molecule. The aim is to engineer the genetics of the organism, building an efficient metabolic pathway to optimise the production of the target molecule. Microbes can be engineered to make all sorts of useful things; proteins such as rennet enzymes for cheese production, peptides like the hormone insulin, and small molecules like vitamins or lifesaving drugs.

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Q. What is biomass fermentation?

A. With biomass fermentation the aim is different – instead of making one specific molecule, the microorganisms put their energy into rapid growth, producing high protein content cells which can then be processed into protein rich food ingredients. This is one of the most efficient ways to produce protein, and the products are often called single cell protein (SCP), being derived from single-celled organisms such as fungi, microalgae, or bacteria.

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Q. What is gaseous fermentation, and how does Jooules do it?

A. We often think of fermentation as solely feeding sugar to microbes, but there is a lot of diversity in microbial life, and different species can grow on all sorts of diets. Some microbes can derive all the energy and carbon they need to build their cells from gas sources. The microbes we work with at Jooules specifically use hydrogen and carbon dioxide gases to fuel their metabolism. This can be as simple as bubbling a mixture of gases through a liquid culture of the microbes and letting them do their thing – although in practice it isn’t quite so easy!

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