A More Open Approach Is Needed to Develop Cell-Based Fish Technology: It Starts with Zebrafish

Abstract

The global demand for fish is rising and projected to increase for years to come. However, there is uncertainty whether this increased demand can be met by the conventional approaches of capture fisheries and fish farming because of wild stock depletion, natural resource requirements, and environmental impact concerns. One proposed complementary solution is to manufacture the same meat directly from fish cells, as cellbased fish. More than 30 ventures are competing to commercialize cell-based meat broadly, but the field lacks a foundation of shared scientific knowledge, which threatens to delay progress. Here, we recommend taking a research-focused, more open and collaborative approach to cell-based fish meat development that targets lean fish and an unlikely but very attractive candidate for accelerating research and development, the zebrafish. Although substantial work lies ahead, cell-based meat technology could prove to be a more efficient, less resource-intensive method of producing lean fish meat. ll

Cellular Agriculture for Production of Cell-Based Seafood

“…Therefore, it continues throughout the fish life (Kiessling et al 2006). A similar observation has been found in fish muscle cells grown in culture media, which shows the engineering advantage of the fish cells over mammalian and avian cell-based meat production (Potter et al 2020). Additionally, seafood is considered an expensive, high-value food commodity, and there are some species of fish, such as tuna, that cannot be produced in a land-based aquaculture facility for their whole life cycle.…”

Scaffolding Biomaterials for 3D Cultivated Meat: Prospects and Challenges

“…Although substantial progress has been achieved in recent years by both for‐profit companies and academic groups, CM remains a relatively new area of investigation. As might be expected for a nascent field that draws heavily on knowledge gained from previous work aimed at a distinct set of problems, review, and perspective papers about CM (at least 50 by our estimate) [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 16 , 18 , 23 , 28 , 37 , 44 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 ,…”

Role and relevance of fish cell lines in advanced in vitro research

“…More concerted efforts and investigations are required to generate information on fish and shellfish muscle cell culture systems to suit in vitro fish meat production systems. The fastest possible path to produce cellular fish meat should start with zebrafish for research and development purposes [ 72 ].…”