Many people's whole diets are made of fake foods. It seems like this would open up new avenues to facilitate the production of these foods. Research into food additives has been going on for decades. A vast industry located in factories along the New Jersey Turnpike supplies flavor and odor ingredients by the ton to companies that make consumer goods. The usual way of finding ingredients often involves sophisticated chemistry in the early stages but then runs into a bottleneck.
New compounds have to be screened by human panels.
Hours of tasting or sniffing can overwhelm the senses, and the panels can screen only so many compounds. Many of the additives begin as extracts from plants or animals, and patenting them is difficult or impossible, limiting their profit potential. The new gene-based companies are devising a much faster and potentially more lucrative way of approaching the problem. As they learn the precise structure of proteins in the tongue or nose that detect taste and smell, they can copy those proteins. The copies can be used to build robotic testing systems that can screen tens of thousands of new chemical compounds a day.