This is Jim Currie, MD of Currie Marketing. I have been involved in sales and marketing of food ingredients for 30 years although I did get a BSc Chemistry many years ago ! One of my pet projects is the production of l-cystine and L cysteine by fermentation. There is a good size market for cysteine for flavour production and as a bread additive. Most of the world supply is extracted from chicken and duck feathers and in the past from human hair. All are sources of keratin. The production of fermentation cysteine requires pure strains of bacteria and good operating procedures. The sequencing of the bacteria I understand should be much simpler and faster today and a lot cheaper. However there still seems to be problems in producing L-cysteine or the dimer cystine from fermentation. If anyone can assist or throw light on this topic please get in touch. My knowledge of biotech is limited but my knowledge of where cysteine can be sold is excellent Jim Currie Currie Marketing 102 St Johns Road Buxton Derbyshire SK17 6UT United Kingdom t: +44 (0)131 208 2952 Direct Line mobile : +44 (0)7733247681 e-mail: Jim.currie (at) curriemarketing.co.uk www.curriemarketing.co.uk [To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information on this FAO Biotechnology Forum, see http://www.fao.org/biotech/biotech-forum/ ] ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the Biotech-Room3-L list, click the following link: https://listserv.fao.org/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=Biotech-Room3-L&A=1