Cultivated Meat and Alternative Protein Sources

The production of sustainable plant-based foods is not simply a question of which process has the lowest environmental impact in the food chain. We have to consider that different degrees of processing might result in different degrees of plant protein nutritional quality in the final food product.

Achieving organoleptic properties of conventional meat is important for cultured meat production. Here, the authors demonstrate that the texture, flavor, and nutritional content of cultured meat can be significantly enhanced by regulating cell differentiation inside hydrogel scaffolds.

Cultured meat technology promises to alleviate protein shortages, but still faces many challenges. Here, the authors achieve serum-free myogenic differentiation of porcine pre-gastrulation epiblast stem cells and generate meat-like tissue via edible plant-based scaffolds without any animal compounds.

Researchers establish an immortalized porcine preadipocyte cell strain for cell-cultured fat research and production, which can be cultured extensively. differentiated within 3D bioscaffolds to generate cell-cultured fat, and co-differentiate with muscle precursor cells, producing a pattern similar to real meat.

Cultured meat (CM) is a sustainable alternative for meat, providing similar eating experience and nutrition. Here the authors present and fully characterize a CM platform from cellularized edible microcarriers and oleogel-based fat substitute.

A marbled muscle-adipose tissue construct is developed by integrating engineered bovine muscle and adipose tissue, and optimized using alginate-based 3D constructs and short differentiation times to increase adipogenic differentiation and maturation

A substitution of FBS in culturing of bovine satellite cells for the purpose of culturing meat is presented, addressing both basal media and growth factors in relation to proliferating and differentiating cells.

Summary: Cultivated or cultured meat is promising to revolutionize the food industry in the coming years to decades, helping to resolve concerns related to the environmental impact and ethical implications linked to conventional meat production. We talked to Dr. Sandhya Sriram, the Group CEO and Co-founder of Shiok Meats Pte. Ltd., Singapore; Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, the former Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Technion, current Director of the Technion Center for 3D Bioprinting and The Rina & Avner Schneur Center for Diabetes Research, as well as the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Adviser of Aleph Farms, Israel; and Dr. Timothy Olsen, Head of Cultured Meat in the Life Science business at Merck KGaA, Germany; about this relatively new and quickly developing sector. They explain what their teams are working on, including the biggest recent accomplishments, speak about the main challenges facing the field and how they can be resolved, and share their visions about the future of cultivated meat, aiming to provide more equitable and sustainable access to nutritious food for the growing world population.