PDB.1HHO
NB-IRON-07
FORTIFICATIONIron-dense protein bar
Heme-mimic fold that chelates Fe²⁺ from leafy inputs and matches animal-source bioavailability without an animal anywhere in the supply chain.
What we build[ 1 / 6 ]
Nutrition,
designed from scratch.
Null Bites is a biocomputation company building nutrition products. We write novel food-grade proteins from first principles, then turn them into things you can eat.
The thesis[ 2 / 6 ]
AlphaFold cracked protein structure in 2020. Billions went to pharma. Nutrition got nothing.
Nutrition is protein engineering. Meat texture comes from myosin and collagen. Eggs set because of ovalbumin. Cheese stretches because of casein. Every property you care about in food traces back to the shape and behaviour of a specific protein.
The tools that design drug molecules can design food molecules. ProteinMPNN and ESMFold, stitched into an autonomous loop that reads papers, generates sequences, scores them against real constraints, and iterates.
Each top candidate goes to the bench, into a fermenter, and out the other side as an ingredient in a real product: performance food, recovery, fortification, gut health, or plant-based whole foods.
Ignored for
5 years
Since AlphaFold 2, every computational biology dollar chased therapeutics.
Agriculture uses
70%
…of global freshwater. And still can’t scale to 10B people.
Field notes[ 3 / 6 ]
Field notes
Essays from the design loop.
Notes on the business model, the protein-design loop, and the parts of food science we are turning into product.
- Essay · 01May 2026
How Null Bites makes money.
First we license designed proteins and sell ingredients. Own-brand food comes later, after the molecule has earned the risk.
5 min readRead - Essay · 02May 2026
Why design food proteins at all.
Protein design left the lab faster than food noticed. This is the case for pointing the stack at meat, dairy, and everyday nutrition.
4 min readRead
The loop[ 4 / 6 ]
Meet the autonomous scientist.
It runs experiments, scores its own results, and only the designs a human would trust make it to the bench.
01
The AI runs experiments
An autonomous scientist reads every new paper, writes new amino-acid sequences, and never sleeps.
02
We score, it re-scores itself
Every candidate is folded in silico and stress-tested, and a self-critic throws out 99% of them as too optimistic.
03
Top designs go to the bench
The survivors are ordered as DNA, expressed in bacteria, purified, and handed to a human food scientist.
04
A product you can eat
Each ingredient is formulated, sensory-panelled, and shipped, because the only benchmark that counts is a person taking a bite.
Under the hoodclick to expand
01IngestLLM · autonomous reader
1,400+ papers parsed into a living corpus of functional motifs, substrate bindings, and known dead-ends. The reader never sleeps and never forgets a result.
02DesignProteinMPNN · RFdiffusion
Novel amino-acid sequences are generated against a target fold with a bundle of functional constraints: heat stability, water solubility, fibre alignment, binding pocket geometry.
03Fold and scoreESMFold · AF-Multimer
Every sequence is folded in silico, then scored on stability, manufacturability, and nutritional fit. The pipeline throws out anything without a clear physical basis.
04Self-critiqueRe-read · re-rank · drop
The pipeline runs 146 cycles of self-correction, where the system re-reads its own output and drops candidates that look too confident. Designs that survive cycle 140+ get to the bench.
05BenchGene synthesis · E.coli
Top candidates are ordered as DNA from a synthesis vendor, expressed in bacteria, purified, and handed to the formulation team.
06ProductFormulate · sensory · ship
The ingredient becomes food and goes through sensory panels with real people. A pass means it ships, and a fail sends the result back to the top of the loop.
The products[ 5 / 6 ]
Five proteins going to market. None of them existed a year ago.
Each candidate is a novel sequence, folded in silico, synthesized at the bench, and formulated into a product with a specific job.
PDB.2MYS
NB-FIBRE-03
PLANT-BASED MEATFibrous whole-muscle analogue
Long coiled-coil engineered to self-assemble into aligned fibres under shear, so the bite resists the way real muscle does.
PDB.1OVA
NB-GEL-02
EGG REPLACEMENTHeat-set bake gel
Ovalbumin-inspired scaffold tuned for lower set temps. Gels like egg, without touching a hen.
+ 2 more products in queue · Performance · recovery · gut-health · plant-based whole food
Get in touch[ 6 / 6 ]
Manufacturing with us.
Eating with us.
Investing in us.
founders@nullbites.comTypical reply in 24h · Bangalore + SFO