Cultivated meat has arisen optimism in the recent years due to its capability to produce meat products in a more sustainable way compared to traditional meat. Despite the technique is not fully optimized, this approach has a lot of projection, and in a few years it could be a reality present in our daily lives (Rasmussen et al., 2024). However, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed, such as the optimization of the process to reduce cost, and the scalability of the production.
To produce cultivated meat, we use satellite cells (SCs) from bovine or porcine muscle tissue. SCs have the capacity to proliferate followed by differentiation and maturation into muscle fibres, which is the biomass in cultivated meat. However, SCs require a scaffold or extracellular matrix to attach to, to be able to proliferate. When culturing 2D cell populations, we can use a commercial compound known as Matrigel®, that works as an attachment. Despite this, Matrigel® is obtained from mouse sarcoma cells and is not allowed for human consumption. Some alternatives to Matrigel® are collagen or gelatin-based scaffolds. When we want to work with 3D cultures, the process becomes more complex due to the lack of ability of SCs to grow in suspension (Post et al., 2020). There are commercial spheres known as microcarriers that work as scaffold for SCs to grow in 3D cultures. One example is Cytodex™, a non-edible microcarrier made of collagen and dextran, that support the cell growth. However, more research focused on developing edible microcarriers to support cell growth is required in order to proceed with the upscaling challenge.
In this project you will be aligned to the project CellCarrier, and work with production of edible microcarriers, and evaluate how well the SCs attach to the microcarriers and if the microcarriers support proliferation of the SCs.
The project is aligned to UN's SGD:
