Cell Sources for Cultivated Meat: Applications and Considerations throughout the Production Workflow

Area of Science:

• Cellular agriculture
• Biotechnology
• Sustainable food production

Background:

• Conventional meat production has significant environmental and ethical concerns.
• Cellular agriculture offers an alternative by producing agricultural products, like cultivated meat, from cells in vitro.
• Cultivated meat, or clean meat, aims to mitigate the negative externalities of traditional meat production.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review current cell sources for cultivated meat production.
• To identify challenges hindering the scale-up of cultivated meat for commercialization.
• To discuss cell-focused considerations in the broader cultivated meat production workflow.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing literature on cell sourcing for cultivated meat.
• Analysis of cell proliferative capacity and differentiation potential.
• Examination of cell-related factors in culture media, bioreactors, and scaffolding.

Main Results:

• Cell sourcing is a critical bottleneck for commercial cultivated meat production.
• Various approaches exist for developing cell sources, each with pros and cons.
• Cell-based considerations are vital for optimizing culture media, bioreactor expansion, and tissue scaffolding.

Conclusions:

• Developing robust livestock cell sources with high proliferative and differentiation capacities is essential for scaling cultivated meat.
• Addressing cell-focused challenges across the entire production workflow is necessary for commercial viability.
• Cellular agriculture holds promise for sustainable meat production through in vitro cell cultivation.