VANILLA ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTION – BIOPROCESS TECHNOLOGY

Introduction

Vanilla? Vanillin?

Greenish-yellow flowers are pollinated by bees, whose ovaries swell into fruits referred to as “pods” (often mistakenly called “beans”) after about 4 weeks. Thousands of tiny, black seeds

line the inside of the pods. The fruit acquires its famous vanilla flavor when it is dried and cured by fermentation.

Vanillin is natural crystal-like component formed on the cured and processed vanilla pods. It is the substance you taste in

vanilla, but it’s not the only ingredient of vanilla. This compound is the major component of vanilla.

Why produce vanillin by biotechnological method?

• Most important aromatic flavor compounds used in foods, beverages, perfumes and pharmaceuticals

• Worldwide demand for natural vanilla beans cannot be met by available supply

• Produced at a relatively low cost but high market cost

Plant tissue culture (PTC)

• Process of producing plants from tissues of the desired plant in an artificial nutrient medium under controlled environment.

• The plants so produced would be exactly similar to the mother plant in all aspects.

• Rationale : based upon cultured plant cell unique biochemical, genetic capacity and totipotency of plant cells.

Why use PTC ?

• Tissue culture raised plants are vigorous and fast growing than conventional plants.

• High degree of uniformity than the conventionally produced plants.

• The tissue culture plantlets are free from diseases/pathogens.

• It is possible to multiply plants that are difficult to propagate by cuttings or other traditional methods.

• Tissue culture plants yield better as they are produced under optimum environment from selected mother plants.

Steps involved in PTC

1) Explant: Cut-out Plant Tissue and Place in Tissue Culture Container

2) Multiplication: Tissue Grows and Produces Small Plants

3) Rapid Multiplication by Transfer of Cultures

4) Transplanting

Advantages of PTC

• Mass production of plant cultivar• Production of pathogen-free plants• Germplasm preservation• Year round nursery production

Disadvantages of PTC

• Contamination risks• Individual response to tissue culture

conditions varies

GMO yeast-vanillin

• Also known as Synbio (synthetic biology) vanillin

• Comes from genetically modified fermented yeast and synthetic DNA

• The yeast by product including the flavour compound as they fed with sugar

Yeast is modified with

synthetic DNA

Leave the modified yeast to ferment the

sugar

The modified yeast is fed with sugar

The fermentation by-product is

collected

General processing step

Advantages of GMO yeast-vanillin

• The process is sustainable and environmental friendly

• The price of vanillin can be reduced• The product was more natural compared to

chemical substitute

Disadvantages of GMO yeast-vanillin

• The loss of economy source for farmers that use vanilla cultivation as main source of their income

• No regulatory structure or even protocols for assessing the safety of synthetic organisms in the environment

• No law stated for labeling and customers rejecting the product with it

• The taste was not really much like the original vanilla

Economic considerations

• Traditional method- high cost and need lots of flowers to produce just 1 kg of vanillin- the cultivation area also did not increase within time while the demand is increasing, making the vanilla price go higher

• Plant tissue culture-based vanilla- slightly lower cost compared to traditional method

- an improvement needed in this field to bring down the cost of vanilla flavour and make the process a viable alternative

• GMO yeast-vanillin- lower prices compared to other method since the yield is much higher- but there are customer rejection towards the product

Economic considerations (cont…)

Safety considerations

• The production of flavouring through chemical means is environmentally unsafe while the natural food additive in high demand.

• Thus is it attracted the attention of biotechnologist to produce comparable organoleptic flavouring.

• However, the risk of using genetically engineered organism for producing flavour needs a detailed assesment.

• From a consumers point of view, labelling the products as biotechnologically derived may be recommended.

Safety considerations (cont…)