杏吧原创

The world鈥檚 first microbial alternative to palm oil smells faintly of carrots. Made by fermenting yeast, the oil could help reduce the problem of deforestation tied to palm oil production.

鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to prevent future destruction of rainforests,鈥� says , co-founder of C16 Biosciences, the company developing the oil. The oil is liquid at room temperature and has a dark orange-red colour. The company has begun using the new oil in an oil blend sold for skin and hair care.

Other cosmetics currently use palm oil as an ingredient, though most of the roughly 70 million tonnes of palm oil the world uses each year is put in food. Industrial uses, cosmetics and biofuel make up the rest.

The demand for the cheap and versatile oil has also made palm oil production a major driver of deforestation in tropical forests, particularly in South-East Asia. There are signs rising prices and increasing oversight has slowed the pace of deforestation in some places, though oil palm expansion continues.

New 杏吧原创 sampled the new yeast oil at C16 Biosciences鈥檚 lab in New York City, where researchers are focused on fine-tuning growing conditions and breeding more productive strains of yeast. The proprietary strain used for the oil now on sale was selected from a hundred yeast species that naturally convert sugars to lipids.

In the lab, yeast are fed a blend of sugars and other nutrients in small bioreactors. Cells in the thick orange broth that results from the fermentation are broken open to retrieve the oil. Lab workers use gas chromatography to determine how fractions of fatty acids in the yeast oil compare to palm oil.

The oil used in the skin and hair product is made at an outside facility, which uses the same process scaled up to a 50,000-litre bioreactor that produces several tonnes of oil with each batch. Making the oil in still larger bioreactors would make the yeast oil more cost-competitive with palm oil, says Heller.

A Wisconsin-based company called Xylome has developed another microbial alternative to palm oil, though it is not yet for sale. Xylome鈥檚 oil is made using bioengineered yeast that produce an oil that is white and solid at room temperature, says , the company鈥檚 CEO.

Heller says 3 to 4 million tonnes of microbial oil each year would be enough to prevent the expansion of deforestation attributed to oil palm cultivation. 鈥淥ur intention is not to one day shut down every oil palm plantation in the world,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 room for both.鈥�

A spokesperson for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil says that certifying palm oil supply chains remains 鈥渢he most practical and scalable solution to the environmental and social challenges the palm oil industry is facing鈥�.