The most popular is foetal bovine serum FBS , a mixture harvested from the blood of foetuses excised from pregnant cows slaughtered in the dairy or meat industries. FBS contains a cocktail of proteins that make it ideally-suited for helping all kinds of animal cells grow and duplicate. Other animal serums work for one or two cell types, but FBS is a natural all-rounder.
And it's absolutely key to growing meat in the lab. Given the right food and conditions, those cells continue to duplicate and can be transferred to a bioreactor where they grow into something resembling real animal flesh.
Eventually you can remove a portion of those cells, prepare them as you would any other burger, and eat them. All the startups working in this nascent industry are doing is growing meat in roughly the same way that animals do, but without having a living body wrapped around it. It is real meat. But unless the clean meat industry can solve the serum question, not a sliver of lab-grown meat will ever make its way into our kitchens.
Read more: What's wrong with eating people? It is the sheer cost of serum that makes clean meat so eye-wateringly expensive. Most companies selling FBS are geared towards biomedical research, where they use tiny amounts of the serum, sometimes less than a millilitre at a time, to grow small clusters of cells.
The clean meat industry, once it properly gets going, will be on a much, much bigger scale. In a paper published in Biochemical Engineering Journal , Liz Specht, senior scientist at the Good Food Institute , a non-profit that promotes animal-free food, estimates that eventually a standard 20, litre batch of cultured cells, which includes serum and other nutrients as well as the meat itself, would yield between 1, and 4, kilograms of meat.
Growth media — media being the generic term for a liquid broth of nutrients — is another liquid full of amino acids, sugars and vitamins needed to keep growing cells healthy, and most of these are easy to synthesise artificially. But ten to 20 per cent of media is made up of, you guessed it, animal serum. Growing demand from the clean meat industry might be enough to tempt biotech firms to start producing serum at scale, says Post, who estimates that he is around three years away from growing commercially-available clean meat.
Cells can cope with small reductions in the amount of serum, Selden says, but if you cut out too much then it starts inhibiting the growth and development of the cultures. Finless Foods is planning to go serum-free by the end of and release its first lab-grown fish paste by the end of , but to pull off both those feats the startup needs to find an alternative source of growth protein.
These could be made by microbial fermentation, the same process that is used to create vegetarian versions of the enzyme rennet, which is used in cheese production. Finless Foods is also considering algal or fungal extracts. Just , a clean meat company that was previously called Hampton Creek , is going down a different route for its animal serum alternative. The company, which is building a database of different plants and analysing each one to find species that could supply the growth factors and other nutrients that dividing cells need.
Like Finless Foods, Just is committed to going animal serum free by the end of Recycling the media used during the growing process is another cost-saving option being pursued by startups. While cells are growing and dividing, they release metabolites into the media, which is then thrown away.
Selecting cells that are more better at converting media into growth would also increase the efficiency and lower the cost of the whole process. Cost, after all, is the whole reason why these companies are putting so much effort into finding animal-free serum.
Without drastically lower production costs, clean meat will never make it out of the lab. For Just's first clean meat produt, Tetrick has set himself the goal of being within 30 per cent of the cost of a comparable meat product. Membrane vesicles, current state-of-the-art: emerging role of extracellular vesicles. Cell Mol Life Sci. Extracellular vesicle-depleted fetal bovine and human sera have reduced capacity to support cell growth. J Extracell Vesicles. Serum extracellular vesicle depletion processes affect release and infectivity of HIV-1 in culture.
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