“This photograph shows me checking microalgae at the TUMCREATE research campus in Singapore. It’s affiliated with several Singaporean organizations, as well as with the Technical University of Munich, Germany.
The microalgae will ultimately make it into the meat alternative that my team and I are developing. We work with microalgae along with soy beans, because they’re both raw materials with an extremely high protein content. For microalgae, this can be as much as 60–70%. And you can grow the algae in reactors, so they’re ideal for an urban environment such as Singapore, which doesn’t have much space for agriculture.
These microalgae are single-cell organisms that get processed to extract their proteins, which we then study to assess their taste and structural properties. My role is about how to process these proteins so that the resulting textures have a good mouthfeel. I mainly look at their self-assembly — something that has been an overarching theme of my career in materials science, although previously I worked on biosensors and photonics.