In order to increase available food for the growing world population and at the same time reducing climate impact of its production, more sustainable sources of food proteins are urgently needed. In this context microbial production systems are promising solutions. However, animal-derived proteins often carry protein decorations and modifications that gives the proteins special properties and functionalities. These modifications, scientifically denoted post-translational modifications (PTMs), are overall linked to more advanced biological systems, and therefore microbes, and especially bacteria, are less capable of producing. This constitutes a major bottleneck for using microorganisms as the efficient expression vehicles they actually are for eg the very valuable animal coded proteins. However, if we can decipher and rank the importance of PTMs including essential sites and amount or degree of modification at each of these sites are essential for protein functionality we can reduce the complexity of this task. The DECIPHER project initiative aims to remove these bottlenecks associated with microbial production of proteins related to the milk system – the caseins – and investigate and hopefully demonstrate the possibility of modifying the bovine caseins in vitro after their microbial synthesis, and produce protein food ingredients with comparable nutritional and functional properties as their native, true animally produced original counterparts.