A hamburger worth its weight in gold

Is it worth waiting for artificial meat? Dmitry Tselikov, Compulenta

About the fact that they are going to grow artificial meat in Holland, "KL" wrote (you won't believe it!) back in 2001. Since then, we have learned that this product will save the world not only from hunger, but also from global warming. But the result is not yet visible. They say one hamburger with such meat would cost a quarter of a million euros (more than 10 million rubles) now.

It is clear that this is the main obstacle preventing the product from being put on the market. Are there any other barriers? Is it possible to bypass them?

Today, the final product is nothing more than muscle tissue grown from stem cells. Real meat is a much more complex formation, because muscle fibers are integrated into a single system with blood vessels and adipose tissue, on which both appearance, taste, and nutritional value depend. In addition, they are not just grown, they are created by regular exercise.

It is possible to overcome some of these obstacles. Blood and fat stem cells have already been identified, and growing them and forcing them to differentiate into mature tissue is probably not much more difficult than cooking muscle fibers in a Petri dish. However, obtaining any type of cells in this way is an extremely expensive process. Adding additional cells, of course, does not make it cheaper or easier.

But it's not enough just to make a "sandwich" of several types of fabrics. The body grows muscles in a very complex environment. Tissues are "washed" by various combinations of nutrients and minerals, salts, hormones and signaling molecules. In addition, the tissues are in constant contact with their neighbors, exchanging proteins with them. Without all this, the cells become sick very soon.

In order to be able to talk about artificial meat as meat, it is necessary to grow it in a similar environment. Some of its features are easy to recreate – the concentration of salts, for example. But developing others–say, the right combination of growth factors–is a phenomenally difficult task, so difficult that scientists who grow meat have not even started it yet. It is cultivated on a layer of feeding cells, and instead of searching for the right combination of proteins in the nutrient medium, the researchers turned to blood serum obtained during slaughter. Think about it: to create artificial meat, I had to turn to the services of animal husbandry.

But even this did not help, and the nutrient medium had to be saturated with a cocktail of growth factors obtained from other sources. Many of them are isolated from vertebrate cells grown in a medium based on (correct!) the same serum.

So, researchers have been learning to grow cells for a very long time. Managed to get rid of a lot of problems. Science knows which growth factors are suitable for a particular type of cell. But they could not refuse the serum. Last year, mesenchymal cells were grown without serum, but this case has remained unique. And only in 2011, the same trick with adipose tissue stem cells was successful.

But this again does not reduce the cost of the process. Half a liter of serum-free medium costs $250, and the company that sells it claims that it takes nine liters to grow a colony of stem cells to such a size that you can do something with it. And this is without taking into account the cost of growth factors, which will definitely have to be added.

Meanwhile, the situation of animal husbandry is becoming more precarious as the demand for meat grows in parallel with welfare. According to most calculations, the production of one kilogram of meat requires seven kilograms of vegetable mass and the associated costs of energy, water and land. There is simply no place on the planet to provide 7 billion people with meat if they all eat like in the West.

Theoretically, artificial meat will require much less land and water. But the works coming to this conclusion (Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production) are based on the fact that the cells will saturate with everything necessary (nutrients, proteins, growth factors, etc.) photosynthetic cyanobacteria and genetically modified E. coli. We don't have such technologies yet and there are doubts that they are even possible...

Prepared based on Ars Technica: Why meat from a petri dish is still a long way from the supermarket.

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15.11.2011