Produce meat without slaughtering cattle

Recently, a team from the University of Maastricht (Netherlands) has developed artificial beef grown from 10,000 stem cells of cattle.

The laboratory culture will help the stem cells divide into billions of cells to form muscle tissues like lean beef.

Prior to that, in 2009, Dr. Mark Post, pioneer of this technology, and his colleagues successfully cultured pork by the same method. He made pieces of meat 2.5cm long and 0.7cm wide. However, "they are white because there is no blood and very little pigment in them," he said. "We're looking at ways to make pigments so that it's as colorful as regular pieces of meat."

With help from an unnamed donor, Post is poised to expand the research on cow cells. "I hope to have a hamburger made this way in a year , " he said.

"I believe we can eat all the meat that was once considered very," said Stellan Welin, a biology researcher at Linkoping University in Sweden. rare". According to Stellan Welin, most people choose the meat of domesticated animals rather than the best meat. Artificial meat will break this consumption rule without killing the animals.

Bernard Roelen from the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), a member of the Gothenburg meeting, is also investigating different types of stem cells from pork to determine how many cells can multiply. month. In 2008, he proceeded to separate a subset of stem cells. "If we start with 1000 cells, after three months, we will have billions of other cells," he said.

Meanwhile, Joost Teixeira de Mattos at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, are now trying to develop supply based on bacteria-green algae (bacteria belonging to Cyanophyta) - bacteria capable of creating extracts rich in amino acids, sugar and fat that animal cells require.