Seeds engineered to grow a genuine cow-milk protein

Israeli researchers coaxed Arabidopsis seeds to make bovine beta-casein, a route to genuine milk protein grown without a cow.

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem engineered plant seeds to produce bovine beta-casein, one of the main proteins in cow's milk. Working in the model plant Arabidopsis, they fused the protein to a fragment of oleosin, which binds to a plant's oil bodies, and tried several targets inside the seed cell. The work, led by Prof. Oded Shoseyov with Almog Ozeri as lead author, was published in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2026.

The result surprised the team. Rather than collecting in the storage vacuoles they aimed for, the beta-casein gathered into clusters near small oil bodies that resembled the natural casein micelles found in milk. The best plants held the protein at about 1.26% of total soluble seed protein, higher, the researchers say, than many earlier attempts at casein in plants, and the clusters built up without harming germination.

If seeds can be turned into reliable factories for genuine dairy proteins, the nutritional value of milk becomes something you grow rather than milk from a herd. The stated aim is exactly that: cutting the land, water, and greenhouse-gas load of dairy livestock while keeping the real protein. That points toward cheaper, less resource-hungry nutrition over time.

This is early. The demonstration lives in a lab model, and the useful clustering was an accident the team now understands rather than a tuned production system. They have since moved the trait into safflower, an oilseed that tolerates hot, dry conditions, the step that would matter for growing it at field scale.

Source: Phys.org