Producing artificial meat using magnetic fields, Singapore scientists achieve impressive breakthrough

In recent years, artificial meat production projects have been promoted to reduce human dependence on animal products. This helps to protect the environment and save more costs. The created product is also more secure in terms of food hygiene and safety

Earlier this week (September 26), scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced a new method of artificially growing meat by attaching animal cells to magnets, helping significantly increase the efficiency of pre-existing artificial meat farming methods.

Invention improves on old methods

Today’s laboratory methods of meat production still more or less require the use of other animal products. For example, some current cell-based meat production methods still require the use of animal serum to help grow and reproduce meat. This has somewhat lost the original ideal of artificial meat farming

To make matters worse, this serum often includes fetal bovine serum, which is a mixture harvested from fetal blood drawn from pregnant cows slaughtered in the dairy industry. or meat.

Other methods to promote cell growth are the use of drugs or genetic engineering, which are equally complex and can produce products that are not good for human health. This complexity increases costs and limits the scale of production, affecting the commercialization of cell-based artificial meat.

To overcome this challenge, the NUS team conceived a unique method that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate the growth of cell-based meat, thus culturing progenitor cells, collected in skeletal muscle tissue and bone marrow.

During 10 minutes of exposure to the magnetic field, the stem cells released countless molecules with regenerative, metabolic, anti-inflammatory and immune-boosting properties. These molecules are necessary for the growth, survival, and development of tissue parietal cells.

A safe and convenient method of harvesting meat

The team from NUS says that meat harvesting from this new method will take place entirely in the laboratory in a safe, convenient and low-cost way.

In this way, the progenitor cells will act as a safe and sustainable bioreactor to generate nutrient-rich secretory vesicles for large-scale meat development. This result facilitates the commercialization of artificial meats in the market.

Normally, muscles already know how to produce what they need to help them grow and develop. Muscles simply need an extra element of “motivation” from the outside, and it is the magnetic flux that does this.

In addition, the new invention can also be applied in regenerative medicine. The team from NUS has used secreted proteins to treat unhealthy cells with promising results. They found that these proteins helped accelerate the recovery and growth of weakened human cells. The invention shows the potential of a new technique to help repair injured cells and speed up patient recovery.

Refer to Phys, New Atlas