Food
New ways of growing foods offer opportunities to rethink how and what people consume every day.
BDC Projects
Culina
The project imagines combining traditional agricultural and cooking techniques with synthetic biology to create a new type of kitchen within the built environment.
Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (2020) | Video | Website
MyoTomato
Plants are often deficient in the amounts of protein necessary to sustain the human diet because they are composed mainly of water and starches. To supplement nutrition, MyoTomato proposes bioengineering edible plants to produce myoglobin, a protein normally found in meat. As part of their lab work, the team inserted a DNA sequence naturally found in beef products into a tomato’s genome using agrobacteria.
School of Visual Arts (2016) | Video
Olombria
Olombria is an agricultural technology that encourages flies to be more efficient pollinators. It is designed for a world in which bee pollination is no longer viable, due to declining bee populations.
Flies already play a major role in pollination, accounting for about 30% of pollination overall and a far higher proportion in cities. Flies make more visits to flowers than bees, but the chances of a visit resulting in successful pollination is lower.
Olombria lures flies using a controlled release of pheromones from a remote-controlled node, which clusters them around the flowers needing pollination. Nodes distributed throughout the farm enable this ‘cloud of flies’ to be shepherded from one region to another, covering all the blossoms that might be in flower at that point.
Royal College of Art (2017) | Video | Website
Beyond 100%
Beyond 100% imagines a microchip that can genetically modify a human’s capacity to acquire, manage, and share nutrition. The chip endows the user with the ability to receive nutrition from new food sources.
Parsons School of Design (2018) | Video
Apigiene
The Apigiene project explores the use of biological materials to deter the number of mite infestations in bee hives.
A new design for the langstroth hive, Apigiene prevents bee colony collapse by adding a fibrous brush filled with zebra mussel diatoms to the apiary to target Varroa mites on the surface of adult bees.
University of Toledo (2018) | Video
Further Resources
Growth AssemblY, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Sascha Pohflepp
The artists envision an herbicide sprayer whose components are grown within the the fruit of bioengineered plants. Learn more⟶
Bistro In Vitro, Submarine Channel and Next Nature Network
Bistro In Vitro is a fictitious restaurant with a menu of futuristic meals derived from biotechnology. Learn more⟶
Notpla Lab
Notpla Lab’s product Ooho is an alternative to plastic water bottles that uses a biodegradable membrane derived from seaweed. Learn more⟶
Banner image: Next Nature Network, Lab Pearls.