Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas

1. What I want to biomanufacture and why

I want to biomanufacture a version of traditional Kazakh fermented mare’s milk - Kumys, that retains its probiotic and bioactive peptide content for a long period compared to the current product allows.

Kumys is a widely popular dairy product among across Central Asiaand has existed for centuries. It’s valued for more than taste: it contains bioactive peptides with antimicrobial, antioxidant, and immunomodulatory properties, and has documented benefits for gut health, lipid metabolism, and cardiovascular function. Despite this, kumys currently cannot be exported, and its shelf life is shorter than 3 days. Combined with mares’ naturally low milk output, this has kept kumys a regional, small-batch product that has never scaled industrially — Kazakhstan’s total national production in 2025 was only around 1,500 tonnes for the entire year.

Thus, my motivation is both personal as well as practical: I’m from Kazakhstan, and kumys is part of my culture, but its short shelf life makes it nearly impossible to access outside the region where it’s produced. Currently it cant be transported between cities in meaningful volume, let alone exported. Solving the shelf-life problem could let this functional food reach a much larger market, including diaspora communities and health/sports-nutrition consumers interested in natural probiotic drinks, without relying on artificial preservatives, which traditional kumys explicitly avoids

2. What living system would I use

Kumys fermentation naturally uses Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) and yeast together

• LAB produces lactic acid (sourness) and
• yeast produces a light alcohol and CO₂, simultaneously.

The natural level of acid, alcohol, and bacteriocin production from a standard kumys starter culture doesn’t hold off spoilage for longer than 3–5 days.

Instead, I would make a use of a starter culture built from selected LAB strains that naturally produce more bacteriocin than average or a single dedicated bacteriocin-producing strain, added alongside the traditional starter, keeping the environment acidic enough, for long enough, to suppress spoilage organisms.

Process: The milk is mixed with the selected starter culture and fermented under controlled appropriate temperature for 1–3 days. LAB and yeast convert lactose into lactic acid, ethanol, and CO₂ as usual, but the selected or additional strains additionally secrete preservative compounds suppressing the spoilage-associated microbes.

Output: Kumys with the same bioactive peptide and probiotic profile as the traditional product, but with a meaningfully longer stable shelf life.

3. How I would use automation

Prototyping stage: A desktop liquid-handling robot (e.g., Opentrons) to screen multiple LAB/yeast strain combinations in parallel small-batch fermentations, varying starter ratios and fermentation time/temperature, then sampling each for shelf-life extension, bacteriocin yield, and flavor-relevant metabolite profile. This automates what would otherwise be a slow, manual strain-selection process and lets me test many combinations without linearly scaling my own hands-on time.

Production stage: Automated bioreactor control systems (temperature, pH, and dissolved-oxygen monitoring/adjustment) to standardize fermentation across large batches — replacing the traditional manual stirring process, which is currently done by hand and is a known source of batch-to-batch inconsistency in kumys production.

4. Scale estimate

(a) How much

Kazakhstan’s national kumys production in 2025 was about 1,500 tonnes/year (~1.5 million liters), limited by the current short shelf life.

As a target, I’ll use kefir — a similar fermented dairy product with established shelf-stable distribution — which is consumed at about 12 L/person/year nationally. Assuming shelf-stable kumys could reach 10% of that level in Almaty (~2,000,000 people, the main hub for kumys):

1.2 L/person/year × 2,000,000 people = 2.4 million L/year (~46,000 L/week)

(b) How long

• Fermenter size: 5,000 L
• Fermentation time: 3 days/batch → ~1,667 L/day per fermenter (~11,700 L/week)

To reach 46,000 L/week: 46,000 ÷ 11,700 ≈ 4 fermenters running continuously.

This is a really modest beginner setup — similar in scale to a small regional dairy.

5. What I don’t know yet

There are couple of things I am not taking into consideration right not, cause of knwoledge and full production understanding lack:

• Whether a preservative-producing strain changes kumys’s distinctive taste, alcohol content, or texture
• approval process a novel starter culture would require for food safety certification, especially if targeting export markets

Final Project