About This Project

Fetal Bovine Serum or FBS is blood plasma containing essential growth factors needed for cells to turn into muscle tissue, the basis of lab grown meat. However, FBS carries the risk of bloodborne pathogens and comes at a premium cost, making lab grown meat unaffordable. We aim to solve this problem by making a genetically modified microalga to produce the same growth factors as in FBS, allowing for decreased costs, as well as faster and cleaner production of lab grown meat.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

While meat consumption is essential for many to meet daily protein needs, the resource strain, environmental pitfalls, and animal suffering problems associated with conventionally produced meat are major causes for concern.

To make lab grown meat, FBS or fetal bovine serum, is required as an additive to grow cells, as it contains growth factors. These growth factors are the essential components of FBS and are needed for cell growth. We aim to replace FBS with just growth factors.

Our experiment hopes to validate and prove the possibility of using recombinant algae produced growth factors in culture medium used to cultivate lab grown meat.

This means the DNA of the microalgae is altered to produce the growth factors.

Epidermal Growth Factor is a successful example of a growth factor that was secreted by microalgae. Using the algae derived growth factors, we can create a media without unknown proteins that is significantly cheaper, ethical, and safe than FBS.

What is the significance of this project?

Using algal-expressed growth factors, the costs of media can be drastically reduced, as algae grow quickly and pose a vastly lower contamination risk when compared to fetal bovine serum.

Furthermore, animal suffering can be reduced, as if lab grown meat is made cheaper and safely, the need of slaughtering becomes irrelevant. While microalgae grow and produce the growth factors, they also sequester co2 while exhaling oxygen, crucial for a net carbon zero workplace.

Our project is significant because it helps lay the groundwork for future scientists to expand in the cultivated meat community due to the lower costs needed to run experiments, leading to more innovation. We truly believe that lab grown meat can be the future if this project is funded.

What are the goals of the project?

We will use a plasmid encoding for the growth factors we want to express and insert it into a cell wall deficient stain of C. Reinhardtii algae in the chloroplasts.

The transformation will be done with acid washed glass beads inside a vortex mixer suspended in polyethylene glycol.

After the microalgae secrete enough growth factors, we will purify the proteins with a gravity his tag column.

In order to evaluate whether our growth factors are bioactive, we will attempt to cultivate chicken muscle satellite cells using the secreted growth factors and observe morphological characteristics to assess success.

Furthermore, a ELISA will be ordered to measure any secreted growth factors.