Quality Ingredients for the Animal Products Alternatives Industry
A special issue of Foods (ISSN 2304-8158). This special issue belongs to the section "Food Quality and Safety".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 March 2025 | Viewed by 20
Special Issue Editors
Interests: lipids; milk; lactation; metabolism; milk genomics; synthetic biology
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In recent years, the growing demand for sustainable alternatives to animal-based products has propelled the academy and industry to develop replacements for meat, milk, eggs, honey, and other animal-derived commodities. Many of these alternatives still lag behind their originals in terms of taste, texture, nutritional value, and functionality. Cellular agriculture offers advantages in overall product similarity but requires complex and costly systems. Precision fermentation, while relatively cheaper, often produces limited ingredients per microorganism strain (e.g., producing milk proteins like casein without other proteins, sugars, and fats). Moreover, special glycosylation patterns or particle macrostructure formation are required to maintain the original physiological and technological functionalities. These modifications still necessitate animal cells and are not currently mimicked by alternative systems. Nevertheless, precision fermentation can produce specific high-value ingredients, like essential long polyunsaturated fatty acids or complex carbohydrates, which enhance the nutritional value of fats and sugars by guiding consumers’ metabolism, influencing the microbiome, and modulating the immune responses.
Taken together, the sustainable production of functional ingredients for animal-based alternatives will likely require innovative strategies and combining multiple production platforms. Synthetic biology approaches can introduce new features to existing systems, enhancing their capacity to produce high-value ingredients and foods. This Special Issue aims to curate the latest knowledge on producing alternatives to animal-based products. We invite researchers and industry experts to submit their research papers and reviews and to share their insights and advancements in this rapidly evolving field.
Dr. Nurit Argov-Argaman
Dr. Roni Tadmor-Levi
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- alternative proteins
- alternative fats
- biomimicking
- fermentation
- cellular agriculture
- synthetic biology
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