Extending the Pioreactor for gas fermentation

Gas fermentation refers to using gases like carbon dioxide and hydrogen as the main inputs to growing microbes, instead of traditional feedstocks like glucose from corn or wheat. This means you're basically growing stuff from thin air! In reality you need to get the carbon dioxide and hydrogen from somewhere, and green hydrogen is made using electricity. So if I'm growing microbes for protein using this method, I'd call it electro-protein.

At LabCrafter, we've been working with AMYBO, a non-profit protein fermentation community, on building an add-on kit for the Pioreactor open-source bioreactor to perform gas fermentation, which we're calling the electroPioreactor. AMYBO, Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh recently received some grant funding from the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing (CARMA) Hub to build an affordable aseptic version of the electroPioreactor, and we're helping them by supplying the hardware! It's still early days, but you can follow along on GitHub.