Chicken cultivated in the laboratory could be made more expensive using artificial capillaries

A piece of thick chicken fillet the size of a bite was cultivated in a laboratory using tiny tubes to imitate the capillaries found in the real muscle. The researchers say that this gives the product a more soft texture.

When you push thick pieces of cultivated meat, a major problem is that the cells in the center do not get enough oxygen or nutrients, then they die and decompose, said Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo.

“It leads to necrosis and makes meat culture difficult with a good texture and good taste,” he said. “Our goal was to solve this problem by creating a means of nourishing uniformly cells throughout the fabric, just like blood vessels in the body. We thought:” What if we could create artificial capillaries using hollow fibers? “”

The fibers used by Takeuchi and his colleagues were inspired by similar hollow tubes used in the medical industry, as for renal dialysis. To create the Laboratory cultivated meatThe team essentially wanted to create an artificial circulatory system. “The dialysis fibers are used to filter blood waste,” says Takeuchi. “Our fibers are designed to nourish living cells.”

First, the researchers printed 3D a small framework to hold and cultivate culture meatFixing more than 1000 hollow fibers using a robotic tool. They then integrated this table into a gel containing living cells.

“We have created a” meat growth device “using our hollow fiber network,” said Takeuchi. “We put living chicken cells and collagen frost around the fibers. Then, we sank a liquid rich in nutrients inside hollow fibers, just like blood flows across the capillaries. Over several days, the cells developed and aligned in muscle tissue, forming a thick structure and steak. ”

The resulting cultivated chicken meat weighed 11 grams and was 2 centimeters thick. The fabric had muscle fibers aligned in one direction, which improves the texture, explains Takeuchi. “We also found that the center of meat remained alive and healthy, unlike past methods, where the environment would die.”

Although meat was not considered adapted to a human taste test, an analysis of the machine showed that it had good chewing and flavors, explains Takenuchi.

Handling hollow fibers can also simulate different cuts of meat, he says. “By modifying the spacing of the fibers, the orientation or the flow models, we can be able to imitate different textures, such as more tender or soft meat.”

Johannes Le Coutre At the University of South Wales in Sydney, although it is impressive research, the process would be difficult to carry out on an industrial scale. “(The) Saint Grail in this whole area is on the scale of new technologies,” he says.