Vireo Advisors, New Harvest, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and Defined Bioscience Awarded Food System Innovations Grant to Generate Protein Thermostability Dataset for AI Applications
Vireo Advisors, along with New Harvest, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and Defined Bioscience, have been awarded a grant from Food System Innovations (FSI) to generate a protein thermostability dataset for artificial intelligence applications!
Growth factors are critical to cultured meat production. Therefore, understanding their stability after cultured meat products are harvested, cooked, and eaten is critical to the growth of the industry. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to models that help predict the stability of proteins and accelerate this type of research. However, the lack of public data on the growth factors used in CM production limits the application of AI to this challenge.
The project will create a dataset on protein thermostability compatible with AI workflows using a combination of publicly available data and data generated by our collaborators at Defined Bioscience. This data will all be released in an open-source format, facilitating field-wide data-sharing and providing a foundation for AI/ML tool development.
To create this dataset, Vireo is analyzing papers on the thermostability of various growth factors used in the cultured meat industry such as albumin, epidermal growth factor (EGF), and hepatocyte growth factor. While there are a lot of published papers on the thermal stability of some growth factors such as the fibroblast growth factor (FGF), insulin, and transferrin, growth factors such as the bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP-4), fibronectin, and vitronectin still need to be studied more in depth to determine their thermal stability.
This project is part of New Harvest’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Cellular Agriculture Initiative and Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI). Thank you to FSI for supporting this important work!