Friday, July 21, 2006

Fish ice cream?

Doesn't sound yummy? How about using a fish protein to make better low fat ice cream?

The deep sea ocean pout has an anti-freeze protein in its blood that protects the fish against tissue damage from ice crystals. That's a useful adaptation to life in the sub-freezing temperatures of the deep North Atlantic ocean.

In ice cream, the fish anti-freeze protein replaces fat by lowering the temperature for ice crystal formation.

So far, so good, but it would take squeezing too many fish to extract the protein from real fish, so Unilever wants to use genetically modified yeast to produce the fish protein in vats.

Opponents of food produced from genetically modified organisms probably don't want to see this happen. Will we see blockades of ice cream factories?

Who knew deep sea fish had such potential for commercial success and scary technology?

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