Lab grown food eats rice as a scaffold for cultured meat

Mondo Science Updated on 2024-02-16

Rice has been used as a scaffold for growing beef muscle and fat cells, resulting in an edible "nut" rice-beef combination that can be prepared like regular rice.

The study, published today in the journal Matter1, uses a manufacturing method similar to that of other cultured meat products, in which animal cells are grown on a scaffold in a laboratory, bathed in a growth medium. The benefit of using rice as a stand is that it can increase the nutrition of rice, and beef rice has a slightly higher fat and protein content than standard rice.

The team of South Korean researchers behind the project hopes that beef rice will be used as a supplement for food-insecure communities or to feed the troops, and to reduce the environmental impact of raising beef. "It's critical to find alternative proteins** or to improve the efficiency of traditional animal husbandry production," said Jon Otley, an animal biotechnology expert at Washington State University, Pullman. "This is probably one of the most important things humanity faces in the future.

In recent years, this demand has spurred a variety of farmed meat projects, from mature salmon fillets to products similar to ground beef. As of last year, only the United States and Singapore had approved the sale of lab-grown meat.

Sohyeon Park, a co-author of the study and a chemical engineer at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said the team tried to grow beef cells directly in the porous crevices of a grain of rice, but the cells did not have much of an impact on the grain. Conversely, the researchers found that coating rice with fish gelatin and the widely used food additive microbial transglutaminase improved cell attachment and growth. After glazing the uncooked rice grains with a gelatin additive mixture, the team sowed cow muscle and fat cells in the grains. The cells are then left in the growth medium for about a week.

At the end of the incubation period, the park washes and steams the beef rice like traditional rice. "It's definitely different from regular rice," she said. "It's crazier and harder. ”

The nutritional content is also different, but only slightly. A 100-gram serving of hybrid rice contains 001 g more fat and 031 grams of protein, with variations of 7% and 9%, respectivelyAccording to the study, this is basically equivalent to eating 100 grams of rice and one gram of brisket – less than half a teaspoon. That's because beef is low in cells, and the cells may just form a thin film on the rice, says John Yuen, a tissue engineer and molecular biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He said that the nutrient content can be improved by increasing the number of cow cells on the rice grains.

That's something the team is working on, Park said. In particular, she wants to increase the fat content of rice, which can be tricky because fat cells don't grow as well as muscle cells. In addition to increasing the cattle content of hybrid rice, researchers need to keep prices low if the product is commercialized so that food-insecure communities can benefit from it. The team estimates that it will cost 2$23 with regular rice (2$20 kg) is quite and much lower than beef (14.).$88 kg). The study estimates that hybrid rice will have a lower emissions footprint than farmed beef.

If production can be scaled up and affordable, hybrid rice could be a cheaper and more nutritious alternative to large pieces of lab-grown meat, such as patties or steaks, Oatley says.

Anita Yuen also finds the concept exciting. "The idea looks cool, you can just eat one meal of rice and take care of everything.

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