WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
Lab-grown meat could bring an end to unnecessary animal deaths. A new research paper just brought that dream one step closer.
A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports has taken us one step closer to the dream of animal-free meat. (And, no, in case your mind immediately goes to the 1973 sci-fi movie Soylent Green, it ain’t people, either!)
“What the paper describes is research designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather that from primary cells taken directly from a pig,” co-author Dr. Nicholas Genovese, a stem-cell biologist (and vegetarian), told Digital Trends. “This entailed understanding the biology of relatively uncharacterized and recently-derived porcine induced pluripotent stem cell lines. What conditions support cell growth, survival and differentiation? These are all questions I had to figure out in the lab before the cells could be turned into muscle.”
As you can imagine, this wasn’t straightforward.
“It was exceptionally [distressing] when conditions I thought would support differentiation caused all of the cells to die,” Genovese continued. “But fortunately I was able to identify a solution that would allow the stem cells to survive, allowing their transition to skeletal muscle.”
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