Why AMYBO

I started AMYBO in 2023 after reading a newspaper article. George Monbiot was arguing that growing protein with microbes, rather than with animals, might be the most important green technology we have, and I went looking for the open source version of it. There wasn’t one. There was a lovely open source tempeh fermenter, a blog post by someone else who had gone looking and found nothing, and a great deal of venture-funded work behind patents. So I started one, and people joined.

AMYBO is a not-for-profit, open source community. Our aim is that anyone will be able to produce tasty, nutritious protein at a lower financial cost, and a much lower environmental cost, than by raising animals to eat. 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.

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 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.

Read more

• About: how AMYBO started and who inspired it, in the words of the original page.
• Proteins: which proteins we could produce, and how.
• Overview and plan from 2023, kept as written.