the royal family have been attending st george s chapel for the first now it s time for click. this week we ve plenty of stomach to whet your appetite. we are in singapore to taste the future, with the starter of pink gold, followed by your main course. this is my first ever taste of cultivated chicken. there is a special 50th birthday treat as we chatted a man who made the first mobile phone call. and for dessert, an internet legend tells us what it was like to be part of the twitter takeover. i really did get to see what was happening, right in the thick of it. it s hot, it s bustling, it s intense. welcome to singapore. i have come to a city state that is home to more than 5 million people and atjust 50 kilometres wide and less than 140 kilometres from the equator, this place feels like it is at the centre of everything. east meets west here, nature meets future. this is a thriving financial hub that seems to be doing pretty well for itself. when you think of singapore you
more of in our diet. the thing is, it only really comes from animal milk, so it s really hard to make more of it to put in other staff. that is, until now, because these guys have worked out how to do it. this is lactoferrin. it s been called pink gold. pink because of the iron, and gold because it is rare and expensive. but this company, turtletree, is finalising a way of mass producing it, not from cows, and not even from cow cells. no, they are fermenting it. using yeast. the process is similar to brewing. these are large fermentation tanks that will be culturing the yeast cells, and each of those cells acts like a little factory, basically producing lactoferrin. the secret here is the yeast has been genetically modified. tu rtletree has ta ken the genes from cow dna, that are responsible for making lactoferrin, and transplanting them into the dna of yeast cells.
when it launches the product at the end of the year, tu rtletree has the precision fermentation processes that should make the protein cheap and abundant enough to add to lots of products like sports drinks and of course plant based milk like oat and almond milk. all without the need for animals or the land for grazing and feeding them. now the company has cracked lactoferrin, it s started to open other proteins that are normally found in milk which could then be added to other things that are not milk. there will be people, consumers, for whom this sounds unnatural. what would you say to them? even though it is not coming directly from cows milk, it is the same protein. what we are showing is that it is so similar and there is so much experience with cows milk derived lactoferrin, we are showing that this is structurally the same and functionally the same. so we re going for a regulatory process called generally recognised as safe.
is finalising a way of mass producing it, not from cows, and not even from cow cells. no, they are fermenting it. using yeast. the process is similar to brewing. these are large fermentation tanks that will be culturing the yeast cells, and each of those cells acts like a little factory, basically producing lactoferrin. the secret here is the yeast has been genetically modified. tu rtletree has ta ken the genes from cow dna, that are responsible for making lactoferrin, and transplanting them into the dna of yeast cells. find the right strain of yeast, brew it in the right conditions, and you ve got yourself something called precision fermentation. with these producing far more of the protein that you d be able to get from milk. cows milk has little lactoferrin in terms of concentration, so you need something like 10,000 litres of cows milk to get one
kilogram of lactoferrin. lactoferrin is used in a variety of products presently. most of it goes into infant formula, which is great because it really increases the nutritional value of that infant formula. unfortunately only around 5% of infant formula has lactoferrin because it is so expensive and in such limited apply. the other issue with cows milk is lactoferrin and other bioactive proteins in the cows milk are sensitive to heat, so the majority of them get broken down during pasteurisation. even if you drink cows milk, you aren t benefiting from things like lactoferrin. when it launches the product at the end of the year, tu rtletree has the precision fermentation processes that should make the protein cheap and abundant enough to add to lots of products like sports drinks and of course plant based milk like oat and almond milk. all without the need for animals or the land for grazing and feeding them. now the company has cracked