Euroviews. AI in biology could find the most creative answers to our climate woes

Generative AI is being used to improve processes across many industries — from automating office work to creating better marketing materials — but it's science and engineering where it could have even more impact. 

When used in combination with biology, generative AI can also be applied to reduce, even cut out, the industrial processes of material production, and dramatically reduce the environmental cost of human consumption.

Synthetic biology, a market valued at €10.4 billion in 2022, has the potential to create products beyond our imaginations – in fact, McKinsey Global Institute has predicted that 60% of everything humans consume could be produced using biology. 

Already, we’re seeing a number of companies producing a range of products in critical industries — materials, chemicals, food, agriculture and pharmaceuticals — using synthetic biology.

For those not quite sold on plant-based food alternatives, lab-grown food products may look like the future. 

Take a company like Perfect Day, who produce bio-based milk using precision fermentation — which involves producing molecular identical dairy proteins like casein or whey by encoding milk protein DNA sequences into microorganisms like yeast or fungi, which are then fermented with nutrients and sugar in tanks (similar to how beer is produced), producing proteins that are identical to traditional ones coming from dairy.

Perfect Days’ milk protein produces up to 97% less carbon emissions and 99% less blue water than traditional milk production. 

According to the company, if only 5% of milk consumed in Europe was animal-free, it would save the equivalent of 660,000 tours of the world in petrol — governments should be taking more significant strides to both invest in the