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Comment by namuol | Hacker News Reader

From 2020, so not sure how up to date this is:

“Solar Foods is a Finland-based start-up company that utilises CO2 captured from air, water and some minerals as sole raw materials to produce a protein powder using renewable electricity.

Branded as Solein®, the product is a microbial protein (also referred to as single cell protein, SCP) obtained by growing proprietary bacteria harvested from nature, in specially designed bioreactors using gas fermentation.”

https://ifst.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsat.3...

Not that surprising that you won’t find the word “bacteria” anywhere on a marketing site, but wish they were at least more up front with exactly how their process is “more efficient than plants”.

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Hmm, obviously cyanobacteria like Spirulina[1] "utilize CO2 captured from air" along with "water and some minerals" and sunlight to make sugars and proteins which people can eat. Not sure I'd describe that as 'fermentation' though if you do anything in a big vat it's a bioreactor and not just... a big vat, apparently.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement)

Also Spirulina in large doses is not kind to your stomach or your bathroom...

Spirulina is a staple foodstuff in some places, is it plausible that the side effects you are suggesting are from someone not adjusted to eating it or contaminations from other cyanobacteria that are known to cause digestion issues?

Also it stains things almost as badly as beet juice (but it is kind of dramatic to have a dark greenish bowl of oatmeal...)

This doesn’t use sunlight. It uses hydrogen gas as the energy carrier.

… Which makes knowing what microbe it’s using even more interesting. I mean, H2-eating microbes are quite common (and are likely how life started around seabed thermal vents), but making these things edible?

(Patent says it’s a strain of Xanthobacter.)

There's no reason they wouldn't be edible. Things are usually inedible because either they have some compound that's meant to be very durable (lignin in wood), they have evolved to be poisonous (many plants and fungi). A H2-eating microbe probably has no reason to evolve either property.

IME this company is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn with way more money spent on PR

Quorn is both a hilarious and genius name.

It's kind of mind-blowing they're apparently so cognizant of not using the word "bacteria", yet they're perfectly fine with referring to their Soylent-esque magic protein dust as "SCP".

> proprietary bacteria harvested from nature

So which is it, proprietary or natural? You can't own something you didn't create.

> You can't own something you didn't create.

Ah Hacker News. Never change.

Meat animals were originally from nature too, but you still have to raise them and breed them properly. They're just bacteria ranchers.

"previously unknown bacteria". Proprietary does not imply copyright, because they may have other property such as patents and trade secrets instead.

whichever - how can you have any form of ownership over a natural bacteria?

1) By keeping the bacteria a secret: not telling which bacteria can be used like this, not telling where you can find it in the nature, not giving anyone a piece of the bacteria culture to use.

2) By patenting the industrial process that makes use of the bacteria, thus gaining an exclusive commercial right to it.

It’s kept by patenting of the process involving the bacteria and the bioreactor, I think. Google Patent query: https://patents.google.com/?assignee=%22Solar+foods%22&oq=%2...

Now CA3153196A1 is the interesting one as it names Xanthobacter sp. VTT-E-193585 as the strain of interest. You even get a 16S rRNA sequence with it for doing some taxonomy! This is not to be confused with FI129574B involving a similar but genetically modified bacterium.

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