safety. At least some of that heavy lifting will be in the form of antibiotics. However, infections aren’t the only invisible enemy that can lurk in a cell. Eating mutant misfolded proteins (prions) can cause diseases such as mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. There is also the issue of what you feed these cells, because they aren’t munching on grass. It will take a lot of medical grade glucose (sugar), metabolic precursors and growth hormones to keep these cells happy.
Cons of lab-grown meat In contrast to a whole animal, it is difficult to tell if a cell is infected. The cultured cell is alive and prone to picking up infections or mutations, just the same as its ancestors did when they were in a live animal. However, unlike its ancestors, the cultured cell doesn’t have the protection of the immune system and wider body to keep things in check. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, lab-grown meat is going to require some very careful oversight to maintain food
Precision fermented proteins If we take a step down from growing whole cells, we can produce individual proteins instead. This can be done in the same way we produce medical proteins such as insulin and human growth hormone (HGH). Scientists call these recombinant proteins, but the food producers have understandably gone in a different direction with the term “fermented proteins”. This involves splicing the gene for your protein of interest into a DNA vector that contains the necessary genetic switches (called operons) to control it and then
introducing this DNA vector into host yeast or E.coli cells. The host cells are brewed in a broth until they get to a nice dense mix and then something, usually lactose, is added to the broth to trigger the genetic switch causing the cell to start producing the protein using the foreign gene. Often the protein gene will be altered to contain a biological tag and this tag can be ‘grabbed’ via a chemical reaction to simplify protein purification. To recap, in case I just lost you with my nostalgic trip down “protein production” lane, the process is: • Genetically modify bacteria/yeast. • Grow them and trigger them. • Pulverise them and purify the protein. All that is do-able. The challenge is then to take a bunch of recombinant meat proteins and make something edible out of them.
The pros of precision fermented proteins Unlike growing whole mammalian cells, growing yeast or bacteria is fairly straightforward. Since these bugs can take care of themselves, you don’t have to undertake a series of questionable
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WAIWHERO ANGUS
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