Removing the Animals from Lab-Grown Meat

The variety of individuals wanting sustainable meals choices is on the rise, and meat grown in the laboratory relatively than on the farm is gaining consideration. Cultured meat is made from stem cells known as satellite tv for pc cells that differentiate into mature skeletal muscle. While the promise of cultured meat could also be altering how individuals take into consideration consuming animals, the recipe for rising skeletal muscle wants updating.

In a current examine revealed in Nature Food, Joshua Flack, cell biology group lead at the Mosa Meat cultured meat firm, described a brand new cell tradition medium for differentiating cow satellite tv for pc cells into skeletal muscle.¹ Their objective was to chop fetal bovine serum (FBS) out of the recipe. FBS is an additive in most tradition media that gives optimum situations for cell development by means of a mix of nourishing molecules. But FBS derives from bovine fetal blood. Because of its animal origins, many researchers have sought serum-free choices.

“The whole aim of cultured or cultivated meat is to try to replace the meat industry, or part of the meat industry, with a much more sustainable alternative,” stated Flack. “It’s somewhat counter-intuitive if you’re still using animal-derived products to do that.”

To develop the medium, Flack explored the mobile responses of bovine satellite tv for pc cells throughout differentiation to determine what drives their maturation into skeletal muscle cells. Researchers sometimes differentiate these cells by means of a course of known as serum hunger, the place cells are first grown in an FBS-rich atmosphere adopted by a shift to a medium with low ranges of FBS. Flack decided the gene expression modifications enabling this mobile reprogramming by performing RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) and proteomic analyses on bovine satellite tv for pc cells all through serum hunger and located {that a} plethora of genes have been up- or down-regulated.

“Trying to work out exactly where to start from was perhaps one of the biggest challenges,” Flack stated. “We had over 2,000 differentially-expressed genes in total in the dataset across these different time points of differentiation that we measured.”

Flack discovered genes in his dataset that associated to muscle improvement, protein folding, and cell-cycle inhibition. Several of the upregulated genes encoded cell floor receptors. The scientists reasoned that activating these receptors could set off differentiation in the absence of serum hunger.

Through some trial-and-error, they formulated a medium that triggered the identical mobile mechanisms as serum hunger. As skeletal muscle cells mature, they fuse collectively to type multinucleate fibers that contract. When Flack grew satellite tv for pc cells in the serum-free medium, he noticed that the maturing cells fused collectively, had related gene and protein expression profiles, had the capability to contract, and fashioned 3-D muscle constructions, all to an analogous diploma as cells grown in serum hunger situations.

“It was always the case, in my opinion, that cultivated meat could be done without serum…and this is, I think, the first really concrete demonstration of that,” stated Elliot Swartz, lead scientist of cultivated meat at The Good Food Institute, who was not concerned on this examine. “A lot of companies don’t put that information out in the open. And so being able to do that increases transparency from a consumer standpoint; it adds legitimacy from a scientific standpoint.”   

Flack subsequent plans to take away the animal-derived parts from the remainder of the cultured meat course of, together with different development media and hydrogels and scaffolds that help the rising muscle. “We’re currently in the process of scaling up that fully animal-free version,” stated Flack.

Reference

1. T. Messmer et al., “A serum-free media formulation for cultured meat production supports bovine satellite cell differentiation in the absence of serum starvation,” Nat Food, 3:74-85, 2022.