May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere.  The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by  Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:

Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques. 

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.

A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.

Wicked!  It’s like Franken-food.  Oh come on.  You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too.  The Guardian has more:

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

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