About AMYBO

Sustainable Protein for All

• Sustainable Protein: protein made without the land, water and emissions that livestock needs. We are working on hydrogen-oxidising bacteria (HOB): microbes that turn hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide into protein, so with water and electricity they make protein from air.
• For All: not for profit, with open source bioreactors, so anyone, anywhere could make protein locally.

Mission statement

AMYBO exists to end world hunger, poverty, and the biodiversity and climate crises by making delicious, wholesome, sustainable protein universally accessible.

• Ending world hunger: protein from air needs no farmland or particular climate, so it can be made wherever it is needed, whatever the weather.
• Ending poverty: affordable, open designs let protein be made, owned and sold locally, keeping the income where the food is eaten.
• Ending the biodiversity crisis: protein from air needs no farmland, so we could rewild the 83% of the world’s farmland that supplies only 18% of our calories.¹
• Ending the climate crisis: protein from air and renewable electricity could save over 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, animal protein’s current share.²
• Delicious: a joy to eat, with no off-putting tastes or textures, or nobody will switch.
• Wholesome: all essential amino acids, no toxins and no cholesterol, so better for you than animal products.
• Sustainable protein: powered by renewable energy, hydrogen-oxidising bacteria make 10–700 times more protein per hectare than plants or animals,³ using 10–100 times less water⁴ and no pesticides, herbicides or antibiotics, and producing no methane or other pollution.
• Universally accessible: we are developing open source bioreactors and a financial model to let everyone, everywhere enjoy sustainable protein.

How we work

Everything goes on GitHub and the forum: the designs, the protocols, the results and the mistakes, so that anyone can build on them. We think open source is also the best protection against a good idea being bought and shelved. And we try to keep the kit cheap, because if it costs more than a small lab or a keen amateur can afford, only well-funded labs will use it. That is why the electroPioreactor, PioFlo and OpenValve exist.

AMYBO is community-led. Biotechnologists, chefs, coders, creatives, engineers, makers, microbiologists, nutritionists and plenty of people who are none of those things all have a part to play. It is currently a not-for-profit trading name of andeye Ltd, so that it can sign contracts and be paid grants; the name and the logo are placeholders for the community to fill in, as the brand page explains.

Where we are

Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh are using our kit under the CARMA Hub project, and Edinburgh and Imperial have the first AEP 0.2 kits. Students built the first units themselves. The medium, the plugin and the designs are all public. What we don’t yet have is a strain we can call our own, and that is the next search: sampling rivers and fens and seeing what grows. If you’d like to help with that, get involved.

Get involved

We need your help

We need biotechnologists, chefs, coders, creatives, engineers, enthusiasts, environmentalists, makers, medics, microbiologists, nutritionists, others.

Every page has an edit link, so please add more, fix what’s wrong, or just get in touch.

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History

Our first video

Watch on YouTube

Our first video.

Footnotes

1. Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science. ↩

2. FAO (2023) puts livestock at 12% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions; Twine (2021) at 16.5%. ↩

3. Leger et al. (2021), PNAS, find over ten times the protein per hectare of staple crops; Poore & Nemecek (2018) give land per 100 g of protein as 2.2 m² for tofu, 7.1 m² for chicken and 164 m² for beef from beef herds, so 10 to 700 times. ↩

4. Sillman et al. (2019), Global Food Security, estimate about a tenth of the water of soya; beef takes roughly ten times more water per gram of protein than soya again (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). ↩