From Farm to Lab: The Potential of Decellularized Plant Leaves for Sustainable Meat Production

Jones, Jordan

Etd

From Farm to Lab: The Potential of Decellularized Plant Leaves for Sustainable Meat Production

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The growth of our global population is projected to outgrow the availability of agricultural land by 2050. This looming reality requires major modifications to agricultural methods including crop and livestock production. As one of the new alternative protein technologies, cellular agriculture holds promise for complementing current animal agricultural practices by producing lab-grown meat. One of the challenges that need to be overcome to reach commercial scale production of structured meat products includes identification and characterization of edible tissue scaffold to reduce the number of processing steps and improve the final product. Due to their affordability, familiarity, and accessibility, decellularized plant-derived materials emerge as an appealing option. Previous research demonstrated that decellularized spinach leaves can support the growth of numerous cell types. In this study, primary bovine satellite cells were grown on decellularized spinach leaves for 7 and 14 days. After 14 days, 99% of cells were alive, 25% expressed myosin heavy-chain, and the average cytoskeletal alignment kappa value was 0.71 ± 0.1. These findings indicated that decellularized spinach can be used as a scaffold for lab-grown beef. The new decellularization approach utilizing food-safe agents yielded comparable decellularization quality to the previously used detergent-based decellularization method while maintain the integrity of spinach scaffolds. Primary bovine satellite cells grown on such scaffolds for 7 days had 97.4% viability. These findings suggested that the new decellularization method was effective and more closely adhered to food safety regulations that could advance cellular agriculture and cultured meat production. Corn husk, a common food waste product, was also explored for its potential to direct cell alignment and improve the texture of the proposed meat product. Both spinach and cornhusk scaffolds presented challenges in achieving desired cell alignment and fusion indices, suggesting that scaffold topography had little influence. Further research is needed to identify optimal plant species and tissues to serve as scaffolds for sustainable meat production.

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