Abstract

From Lab to Fork: 3D Tissue Engineering For Meat Production

Shoji Takeuchi, Professor and Director, The University of Tokyo

Research on "cultured meat," as typified by cultured hamburgers and chicken nuggets, has been studied world wide. These were made from randomly arranged muscle cells, so-called "minced meat." In contrast, our research group has been working on the in vitro fabrication of 3D structures of muscle tissue with the goal of realizing steak meat with its original texture. Bovine muscle tissue in the shape of a dice steak (1.0 cm x 0.8 cm x 0.7 cm) was prepared by forming a gel containing myoblasts grown from bovine muscle satellite cells into a sheet shape, stacking the sheet with both ends fixed to anchors, and culturing it. Myofibers in the tissue showed sarcomere-like structures stained with anti-a-actinin antibodies, suggesting that the myofibers were not just an aggregate of myoblasts, but that myoblasts fused with each other and underwent differentiation. In addition to these results, the latest developments will be presented in this talk.