Grant: Alliance Grants

House crickets are a promising sustainable source of protein for human food and animal feed in a changing world. A current focus is to scale up and automate cricket production, and to optimise production for specific outcomes (e.g. maximise biomass production or protein content). Insect growth rate, nutrient content and survival are all dependent on temperature, so this project will explore these relationships, allowing Aspire Food Group to optimise their rearing environment for specific outcomes, and react flexibly to temperature variations during production. The interns will learn insect rearing in industrial and laboratory settings, a range of physiological, biochemical, and molecular biology skills relevant throughout the biotech and agricultural sectors, as well as critical thinking and communication.