Cultivated
Cell line repositories and standardised isolation and maintenance protocols
Currently, there appears to be little to no consensus at this stage in the cultivated meat field regarding which starter cell type is preferable. There is a need to improve our understanding of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different cell types for each species important for cultivated meat.
-
Cultivated
- Cell line development
Resources
- Deep dive: Cultivated meat cell lines
- Cell line development and utilization trends in the cultivated meat industry – 2023 report
- Cell Sources for Cultivated Meat: Applications and Considerations throughout the Production Workflow
- Kerafast cell line repository
- GFI workshop on promoting stemness and proliferation in fish cell cultures
- National Repository for Fish Cell Lines (India)
- Cultivated Meat Research Tools Database
Current challenges
The development of humanely sourced and thoroughly documented and characterised cell lines from the common food species — together with a mechanism for licencing and distributing these lines to researchers and companies — will remove a key barrier to entry into the field of cultivated meat. Source material to manufacture cultivated meat and seafood may include embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, or adult muscle stem cells. Currently, there appears to be little to no consensus at this stage in the cultivated meat field regarding which starter cell type is preferable. There is a need to improve our understanding of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different cell types for each species important for cultivated meat.
In the field of cultivated seafood, reports of continuous myogenic, adipogenic, mesenchymal stem cell (MSC), and embryonic stem cell (ESC)-like lines from aquatic species are relatively sparse. Many fish lines have reported doubling times of several days, posing a major challenge to both lab-scale research efforts into cultivated seafood and commercial scale-up efforts. Premature differentiation presents an additional challenge to large-scale cell production by depleting the pool of proliferative cells.
Lastly, the development of research toolkits (including antibodies for commonly-used cell type markers and fully-annotated genome sequences) for varied animal species applicable to cultivated meat and seafood is also needed, because currently a suite of assays, genomic data, and reagents only exist for commonly used lab species like mice or fruitflies.
Proposed solutions
- Development of open-access, standardised protocols for performing cell isolation from a variety of source tissues and species for the establishment of robust cell lines for cultivated meat & seafood applications.
- Specifically for cultivated seafood, solutions that investigate strategies to achieve rapid and reliable proliferation of source cell lines from aquatic species—either by direct manipulation or by selecting desirable phenotypes within a heterogeneous cell population—may help to produce cell lines with the desired characteristics. Also, there is a need to better understand the differentiation potential of various seafood cell types.
- Robust genomic data generation for identified cultivated meat & seafood-relevant species is essential for developing species confirmation assays, garnering greater insights into cell metabolism, and identifying safe harbour loci for cell line optimisation efforts.
- The development of commercialised, standardised assays for species identification such as Short Tandem Repeat (STR) or Cytochrome C Oxidase I (COI) assays for cultivated meat & seafood-relevant species is also needed. Some commercially available STR assays for cows and pigs and COI assays for a variety of species are available.
- Establishment of a centralised repository of cultivated meat and seafood cell lines (such as the Kerafast repository established in partnership with GFI) that can manage licence agreements, maintenance, and shipping for commercial use.