A New Approach to the Production of Cultured Meat with Enhanced Texture

Future food production needs to meet a growing demand for food and changing diets, as the human population is predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050. Use of resources such as phosphorous and nitrogen are already exceeded sustainable limits, with agriculture placing large requirements on these resources. Further demands on the earth systems to increase food production will not be able to be supported. However current livestock production systems are major contributors to anthropogenic climate change and so, significant increases in production to meet growing demands will be unsustainable using current systems. Yet livestock products are nutrient dense and so cannot be discounted from diets without a suitable, healthy replacement. Therefore, transformative and disruptive production methods are needed to sustainably increase food production. Cultured meat is attracting great interest as a candidate for production of livestock products with reduced environmental impacts. This exciting project is to develop a new bioreactor method to prepare cultured meat. This technology produces aligned self-releasing tissue using a templating approach within the bioreactor. The approach has exceptional potential to produce aligned tissue for cultured meat tissue production with enhanced structural and textural properties. This is a collaborative project involving the University of Reading, Aberystwyth University and CASE partner Cellular Agriculture, a UK Small enterprise based in Llanelli, Wales.

This cutting-edge project will investigate the production of aligned extracellular matrix within self-releasing tissue produced from myoblasts. This will use peptide amphiphile coatings on aligned templates in cell culture plates. The peptide amphiphiles stimulate cell adhesion and facilitate release of tissue using cell-expressed matrix metalloproteases (MMPs). The alignment template is a micropatterned Teflon substrate. This is prepared by a controlled rubbing process which leads to the production of microgrooves in the substrates. This templates the alignment of extracellular matrix produced by cells including collagen and other extracellular matrix proteins. The project involves the use of commercially available mouse myoblast cell lines for this initial work before extending the research to porcine cell lines. You will culture cells and examine the extracellular matrix produced using histochemical assays of extracellular matrix components, along with morphology and property studies and meat texture analysis, at the University of Reading. The project work at Aberystwyth will utilise the knowledge and expertise within the UK small company Cellular Agriculture's currently funded research projects at Aberystwyth and Bath on myoblast muscle cell sources and bioreactor designs to test the aligned extracellular matrix