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CULTURED MEAT; MANUFACTURING OF MEAT PRODUCTS THROUGH “TISSUE-ENGINEERING” TECHNOLOGY.
- April 25, 2012
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Uncategorized
The idea: To produce animal meat, but without using an animal. Starting cells are taken painlessly from live animals, they are put into a culture media where they start to proliferate and grow, independently from the animal. Theoretically, this process would be efficient enough to supply the global demand for meat.
All this would happen without any genetic manipulation, i.e. without the need to interfere with the cells’ genetic sequences.
Producing cultured meat for processed meat products, such as sausages, burgers and nuggets should be comparatively simple, whereas cultured meat which should be more highly structured, such as for an in-vitro steak is considerably more of a challenge.
A steak is made of muscle tissue which is threaded through with extremely long, fine capillaries which transport blood and nutrients directly to the cells. It is much more difficult to reproduce such a complex structure than it is to put together the small balls of cells which grow to larger balls of cells which in turn become in-vitro chicken nuggets.
Starter Cells:
These can be taken painlessly from live animals via biopsy. The question is: Which type of cells should be used? Stem cells are cells which, in a manner of speaking, have not yet decided what they will become; muscle cells, bones cells or one of so many other kinds of cells?
This is a disadvantage because very specific cells are needed for the production of in-vitro meat. However, the advantage of stem cells is that they proliferate rapidly. The alternative to using stem cells would be to use fully defined muscle cells that “know what they are” although the problem here is that they hardly multiply at all. A compromise is to use cells which are between the two extremes, in other words, cells that proliferate at an acceptable pace and that are at the same time sufficiently differentiated from other cell types, for example, myoblast cells.
Article taken from http://www.futurefood.org/