Muscles with cellulose

The British have grown meat on a grass frame

Anastasia Kuznetsova, N+1

British researchers have developed a new method of growing meat in the laboratory, which will help improve its structure. They removed the cells from the grass, and only the cellulose frame remained in it, on which the myoblasts were then planted. The structure of the grass extracellular matrix helped dividing cells to line up in parallel rows and eventually create three-dimensional muscle tissue with a fibrous structure. The study was published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research (Allan et al., Decellularized grass as a sustainable scaffold for skeletal muscle tissue engineering).

The idea of growing meat in a test tube has been very popular lately. Recently, a large factory for the production of meat grown in the laboratory was opened in Israel. It will produce chicken, lamb and pork meat at a faster rate than at traditional cattle breeding enterprises, but at the same time produce 80 percent less greenhouse gases (although the exact mechanisms for reducing emissions are not specified). Despite the advantages of this method of production from the point of view of ecology and ethics, it still has disadvantages: the structure of meat from a test tube is still different from traditional meat. The fact is that in laboratory conditions it is difficult to grow muscle tissue that will be identical in structure to real muscles — for this it is necessary to force cells to divide in such a way that they create fibers.

Researchers from The University of Bath, led by Paul A. De Bank, noticed that the structure of some herbs is similar to the structure of meat fibers, and they came up with the idea of using them to create a basis for growing muscle cells. Scientists collected rye, fescue and bluegrass from the lawns of the campus. Then they removed the cells from the grass, treating them with chemical solutions until only the extracellular matrix consisting of cellulose remained. The framework thus obtained was populated with myoblasts.

About 35 percent of the cells were fixed on the cellulose frame after three hours, which far exceeds the effectiveness of fixation on untreated grass (9 percent). Then the cells continued to divide, and the structure of the extracellular matrix of the grass helped them to line up in parallel rows and form fibers. Eventually, the cells formed three-dimensional muscle tissue.

The efficiency of growing myoblasts on a frame of grass. A drawing from an article by Allan et al.

In the future, researchers will have to improve the method to increase the number of cells that are fixed on the grass frame. The tests will also need to be repeated with the myoblasts of other animals, for example, cows and pigs.

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