Cellular agriculture is innevitalbe

WHY CELLULAR AGRICULTURE IS INEVITABLE

17th Oct 2016

By Musinguzi Muhsin Musingubya@yahoo.com The growing population of the world needs more meat and thus the demand for meat is expected to double which will put more pressure on the environmental resources that will be available by that time. Conventional farming demands more resources and ends up polluting land and water with net increase in greenhouse gas effect. This calls for the use of other techniques that include cellular agriculture. The use of cellular agriculture show more responsible utilization of the available resources. According to Edelman, (2005) scaffolds and self-organization techniques can be used to grow lab meat, though more research needs to be done to find more efficient and cheap ways of producing lab meat (Bhat and Bhat, 2011b).

SOME OF THE TECHNIQUES OF CELLULAR AGRICULTURE 1. Scaffolding techniques Embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are isolated of from the farm animals and grown in stationary or rotating bioreactor using a growth medium of plant origin. The cells then are allowed divide and redivide for several weeks or months together and then finally differentiated into different muscle fibers on a scaffold inside the bioreactor which has collagen meshwork or microcarrier beads, stem cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers which can be harvested, processed, cooked, and consumed as emulsion or ground meat products (Kosnik et al. 2003).

2. Self-organizing techniques Hight quality, good structured in vitro meat can be produced from explanted animal muscle tissue in self-organizing constructs (Dennis and Kosnik 2000). Gold fish (Carassius auratus) muscle explants have been cultured by (Benjaminson et al.,2002) they sought to test if cocultures of cells derived from similar “adult muscle tissue can adhere, attach and grow onto a muscle tissue explants. Self-organizing in vitro meat production may hold the promise to produce the highly structured meats as the explants contain all the tissues which make up meat in the right proportions and closely mimics in vivo situation, however, lack of blood circulation in these explants makes substantial growth impossible, as cells become necrotic if separated for long periods by more than 0.5 mm from a nutrient supply making large scale production more difficult (Dennis and Kosnik 2000).

Using a branching network of edible porous polymer to provide nutrients to the myoblasts and other cell that make up meat can help to solve the problem (Wolfson 2002).

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CONCLUSION With these methods it is clear that a growth media is provided that is favorable to the growth of muscle cells, therefore it suggests that lab grown meat is safe since it is the animal cells that multiply to form tissues. This technique can be used to save the world of scarce resources since conventional meat production systems require a relatively high proportion of land, energy, and water and ends up contributing to the emission of greenhouse gases and significantly polluting water, air and land.

Besides that meat produced in the conventional method is associated with nutritional related complications, animal right violation and ecosystem imbalance. The global meat consumption is rising and is expected to rise more with growing population. This means it will be accompanied by increased water and land contamination plus greenhouse gas emissions and nutritional related complications. Therefore cellular agriculture is inevitable in saving the world from the problems associated with the growing population.

REFERENCES Bhat Z F, Bhat H. 2011c. Tissue Engineered Meat-Future Meat. Journal of Stored Products and Postharvest Research, 2, 1-10.

Benjaminson M A, Gilchriest J A, Lorenz M. 2002. In vitro edible muscle protein production system (MPPS): Stage 1, fish. Acta Astronaut, 51, 879-889.

Kosnik P E, Dennis R G and Vandenburgh H H. 2003. Tissue engineering skeletal muscle. Guilak F Edition, Functional Tissue Engineering, New York, Springer-Verlag. p-377-392.

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