Japanese scientists as a result of research work developed a new method, allowing to create artificial beef meat using stem cells. The resulting material is not different from the main qualities from natural, and also has a number of other advantages.
In the process of its scientific work, biotechnologists representing Tokyo University (Japan) have created an analogue of technology used by specialists in regenerative medicine and allowing to increase and restore muscles. For comparison, doctors thus recreate lost muscle tissues by growing thin layers of fibers of their stem cells, laying them on each other in a special way. To check the initial hypothesis, the head of the study of Sydy Taketo and his colleagues prepared several frames created from hydrogel and polymers, very similar in their structure to the basis of muscle fibers. Then the data frame structures were sodged with stem cells, stimulated the "construction" with electric strokes and at the end were collected from it an analogue of the muscular tissue of the cow. The result was quite realistic looking meat fragments, having an area of about 1 cm2 and a thickness of several millimeters each. The main positive point was the fact that the resulting meat, both in the cheese and fried, for strength, structure, painting and other other properties, was not different from natural.
It is noteworthy that the world's first samples of artificial meat colleagues of Japanese specialists have created another seven years ago, but its current cost at the level of more than a thousand US dollars per kilogram is considered absolutely not profitable. Moreover, such material, according to experts, is not attractive to taste, and it resembles liquid minced liquid, and not the muscles. As researchers explained, the reason for this is the unnatural structure of meat grown exclusively from stem cells, as well as the absence of a complete set of cells characteristic of real beef or pork in such fibers.
By the way, the Japanese developers mentioned that the innovative meat material obtained did not contain bacteria in itself, which distinguishes it from real beef. This allows him to persist longer and empowers, as scientists are hoping, special attractiveness for potential consumers. Scientific work materials were published in Science of Food.