Artificial capillaries could improve texture of lab-grown chicken

Thick-sized chicken fillets are grown in the lab using small tubes, mimicking the capillaries found in real muscles. Researchers say this gives the product a texture of Chue.

When growing thick pieces of cultured meat, one major problem is that the central cells are dead and broken because they don’t get enough oxygen or nutrients. Takeuchi Kami At the University of Tokyo.

“This leads to necrosis and makes it difficult to grow meat with texture and taste,” he says. “Our goal was to solve this by creating a way that evenly delivers cells throughout the tissue, as blood vessels do within the body. “What if we could use hollow fibers to create artificial capillaries?”

The fibers used by Takeuchi and his colleagues were inspired by similar hollow tubes used in the medical industry, such as kidney dialysis. To create lab-grown meat, the team essentially wanted to create an artificial circulation system. “Dialysis fibers are used to filter waste from the blood,” Takeuchi says. “Our fibers are designed to feed live cells.”

First, researchers 3D printed small frames to hold and grow cultured meat, and installed over 1,000 hollow fibers using robotic tools. This sequence was then embedded in a gel containing living cells.

“We created a ‘meat growth device’ using a hollow fiber array,” Takeuchi says. “We placed collagen gel around the cells and fibers of live chickens. Then we poured nutrient-rich liquid into the hollow fibers, allowing them to flow through capillaries. For several days the cells were aligned with the muscle tissue and formed a thick, steak-like structure.”

The resulting cultured chicken weighed 11 grams and was 2 cm thick. Takeuchi says that the texture was improved as the tissues had a one-way alignment of muscle fibers. “We also discovered that the heart of meat is healthy and healthy, unlike the way the centre dies.”

While meat was not considered suitable for human taste testing, mechanical analysis showed good bite and flavor markers, Takeuchi says.

Manipulating hollow fibers could potentially allow you to simulate different meat fillets, he says. “Changing the spacing, direction, or flow patterns of the fibers may allow us to mimic a variety of textures, including softer, chewy meats.”

Johannes Le Cartre While an impressive study at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, he says the process is difficult to implement on an industrial scale. “[The] The Holy Grail across this sector is expanding new technology,” he says.