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About AMYBO

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

  • Ending the climate crisis: livestock produces 12–17% of global greenhouse gas emissions (FAO, 2023; Twine, 2021). Protein made from air and renewable electricity needs a fraction of that.
  • Ending world hunger: livestock uses 83% of the world’s farmland but supplies only 18% of its calories (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). Protein made from air needs no farmland and can be made anywhere, independent of weather, soil and season.
  • Ending poverty: affordable, open designs, so protein can be made, owned and sold locally.

AMYBO is a not-for-profit, open source community. The route we’ve chosen is hydrogen-oxidising bacteria: microbes that make protein from hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, gases you can make on a bench from water, electricity and a SodaStream cylinder. The background pages explain why we picked them over the alternatives.

We would love you to join us, feel free to get involved in any way you like.

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.

Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh are using our kit under the CARMA Hub project, and Edinburgh has 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.

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.

Watch on YouTube

Our first video.

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