Researchers grew a single chunk of chicken in the laboratory that was about 7 centimetres long and 2 centimetres thick.Credit: Shoji Takeuchi, The University of Tokyo
Researchers have created what they think is the largest chunk of meat grown in the laboratory yet, thanks to a designer ‘circulatory system’ that delivers nutrients and oxygen into the growing tissue.
Shoji Takeuchi, a biohybrid system engineer at the University of Tokyo, and colleagues report growing a single piece of chicken that measures 7 centimetres long, 4 centimetres wide and 2.25 centimetres thick. Weighing in at 11 grams, it is about the size of a chicken nugget. The work was reported today in Trends in Biotechnology1.
The meat hasn’t yet been made with food-grade materials, so it isn’t ready for consumers’ plates and the team hasn’t tasted it. But the researchers are talking to several companies about developing the technology further.
Mark Post, chief science officer for the company Mosa Meat in Maastricht, the Netherlands, who unveiled the world’s first lab-grown hamburger in 2013, says the work is “an extraordinary engineering achievement”.
Mix and mash
Plenty of people have grown meat in the lab before, using biopsied cells from animals to produce food without slaughter. A handful of companies are now licensed to sell cultivated meat in a few nations, including the United States. Last year, the United Kingdom became the first European country to approve the sale of cultivated meat in pet food.
Lab-grown meat: the science of turning cells into steaks and nuggets
But most of these efforts grow only tiny pieces of meat that are then assembled into a larger product, by printing cells onto an edible scaffold, for example, or by gluing lab-grown bits of meat together with an edible binder. GOOD Meat, a division of the food-technology firm Eat Just in Alameda, California, is licensed to sell lab-made chicken in Singapore and the United States. It generates shredded chicken from just 3% cultivated meat and plant-based ingredients. Aleph Farms in Rehovot, Israel, uses 3D-printing technology to combine beef muscle and fat cells to make products that look like marbled steaks, which it has approval to sell in Israel.
Growing a large slab of meat, rather than sticking chunks together, is desirable because it helps to better mimic the natural structure and texture of conventional meat. But this feat remains “one of the major challenges in the field”, says Amy Rowat, a biophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works on lab-grown meat. The cells need to continuously receive nutrients and oxygen to remain healthy and grow. In animals, blood vessels do this job, ferrying nutrients throughout tissue.
The team used a bioreactor threaded with many semipermeable, hollow fibres (shown here) in which to grow their cultured chicken.Credit: Shoji Takeuchi, The University of Tokyo
