Cultured meat is shaping up as a greener, cruelty-free alternative to conventional meat production. it’s fat. However, a team of researchers has developed a method for large-scale cultivation of fat that has a texture and structure similar to animal fat.
Cultured meat, also called cultured meat or artificial meat, is produced by culturing animal cells using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic processes. This technique creates a product that resembles traditional meat. However, farmed meat lacks fat, a key ingredient for both flavor and texture.
Imagine the crackling of crispy bacon and crispy pork. The fat contained in it enhances the taste and creates a pleasant “texture”. Scientists have found that some flavors stick to fat molecules, causing the taste to linger in the mouth. In fact, consumer tests show that natural beef with 36% fat scores higher in taste than its leaner competitors.
But fat-free cultured meat may soon be a thing of the past. Researchers have successfully created fats with a texture and composition similar to naturally occurring animal fats in the lab, and the technology is scalable, they say.
Until now, it has been difficult to produce large amounts of cultured fat. Unlike in nature, where blood vessels supply fat with oxygen and nutrients, laboratory-made fat tends to lack these important elements as it grows.
To circumvent this problem, researchers first grew adipocytes from mice and pigs in two-dimensional layers, then harvested these cells and treated them with binding agents such as sodium alginate and microbial transglutaminase (mTG). Created a three-dimensional mass that is held together. with some foods.
“Our goal was to develop a relatively simple method to produce large amounts of fat,” says John Yuen Jr., lead author of the study. “Adipose tissue is primarily cells. , and with few other structural components, we reasoned that post-growth aggregation of the cells was sufficient to recapitulate the taste, nutritional and textural profiles of native animal fats.”
To see if aggregated fats have similar characteristics to natural animal fats, researchers tested how much pressure lab-made fats could withstand. found that cultured fat bound with sodium alginate can withstand similar pressures as livestock and poultry fat, whereas fat bound with mTG acts like lard or tallow.
Recognizing that natural fat-based compounds improve flavor, the researchers next examined the molecular composition of cultured mouse fat. I discovered that it is different from the fatty acids of fat. Cultured pork fat was very close to native tissue in fatty acid composition.
The results of this study suggest that it is possible to supplement cultured adipocytes with lipids, so they more closely match the composition of natural meat. The researcher’s method for is scalable.
“This method of aggregating cultured adipocytes with binders can be applied to large-scale production of cultured adipose tissue in bioreactors, which is a key obstacle in the development of cultivated meat,” said the study’s corresponding author. said David Kaplan, “We continue to look at all aspects of cultured meat production to enable mass production of meat that looks, tastes and feels just like the real thing.”
The study was published in a journal e-life.
Source: Elife
