Micropatterning Technology to Design an Edible Film for In Vitro Meat Production

A New Edible Film to Produce In Vitro Meat

“…In vitro or cultured meat has emerged as a novel concept in the field of food science and technology, which requires novel biotechnological tools in order to be investigated and developed. In vitro meat is real meat produced by in vitro culture of cells through biotechnology tools, avoiding the slaughter of farmed animals [1][2][3][4][5][6]. An historic date was 5 August 2013, when Professor Mark Post showed to the world a hamburger made of in vitro meat.…”

“…The benefits of industrialization of in vitro meat are related to animal welfare, food hazards, human health, and environmental impact [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Three motivators have been identified to investigate the production of livestock meat alternatives: (a) with the predicted substantial increase in meat demand, we will quickly run out of production capacity, as already a large proportion of arable land is dedicated to livestock feeding and management; b) there is a growing concern about the environmental impact of livestock breeding; and (c) high density herding and slaughtering has sparked societal concerns about animal welfare and public health [1].…”

“…A scaffold is a matrix (soft material) where the anchorage-dependent cells (e.g., muscle cells) can adhere, remain viable, proliferate, and differentiate [4,8]. In addition, the use of mammalian components in the scaffold should be avoided to effectively reduce the slaughter of bovines [2].…”

“…However, to the authors' knowledge, there are no available commercial scaffolds based on non-mammalian compounds for in vitro meat currently in the market. The scientific research on scaffolds for in vitro meat are still scarce, and they are focused on the development of microstructures to align muscle tissue formation [2,11].…”

“…Surface modifications by using oriented collagen fibers [16], oriented pore [15] electrospinning [17], and fibrous gelatin [11] have been used with good results in the field of muscle tissue engineering. It has been studied that the culture of myoblast on parallel microgrooves can also guide the muscle tissue formation [2,18].…”