Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by papertigerau on Sunday September 17, 2023 @05:44PM
(#37549648)
Your experience matches with what I've seen.
If you give the cells something spherical [1] to adhere to then you can achieve a higher yield, but still only a monolayer.
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by nicoburns on Sunday September 17, 2023 @06:21PM
(#37549885)
> The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
How does that work inside the human body, where presumably they do form 3D structures?
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by jojobas on Sunday September 17, 2023 @08:51PM
(#37550947)
Tumors grow when various inhibition mechanisms fail.
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by civilitty on Sunday September 17, 2023 @10:16PM
(#37551453)
It's incredibly complicated and every type of tissue has it's own specific mechanisms for forming it's 3D structure but the short answer is that there is an "extracellular matrix" that forms a network of macromolecules using collagen, elastin, fibronectin, and a bunch more signaling and structural proteins that organize cell growth.
The ECM starts developing in the fetus and figuring out how it grows from a few cells into a bunch of differentiated organs, muscles, bone, etc. is a core problem in embryology (biology in general, really). If we knew enough to make proper meat, we'd probably be steps away from a Jurassic park scenario.
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by Loughla on Sunday September 17, 2023 @07:29PM
(#37550399)
>when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
I might be very stupid, but if this is a thing, how do we grow? Aren't, for example, bone cells always touching other cells?
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by xmcqdpt2 on Sunday September 17, 2023 @08:32PM
(#37550832)
AFAIK the specific patterning and asymmetry of surrounding cells is what convinced the cells to form organs. The inhibition stops random cells in media from forming a big randomly configured organ, ie a tumor. Here is a paper about it,
https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/febs.14...
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by jiggawatts on Sunday September 17, 2023 @10:08PM
(#37551402)
Surely they would be using immortal cancer cells? Those are used in human cell cultures because they conveniently have unbounded growth.
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by raylad on Monday September 18, 2023 @02:52AM
(#37553084)
That would be a Bad Idea: if anyone ate raw cancer cells they could potentially form a tumor if they got into a cut and survived.
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by jiggawatts on Monday September 18, 2023 @05:50AM
(#37554151)
Only if you're eating human meat... cloned from you or your twin.
Re:Insiders reveal major problems at lab-grown meat startup
by JetSpiegel on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @08:53PM
(#37591978)
Do you want to taste a McChicken made from pure chicken cancer?
The way we grew them normally was in those roller bottles [2]: you have some tissue culture medium in the bottle (containing fetal calf serum, which is still required to grow mammalian cells AFAIK, another reason most of these companies can't do what they say) and other components. Then the bottles are put on their sides on a roller mechanism, in an incubator with a controlled CO2 concentration.
The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
So these guys are trying to grow tissue and what they seem to be doing instead is growing monolayers just like this on the inside of roller bottles, scraping them off, then putting them together again.
One thing that disturbed me was that they need to coat the bottles with porcine gelatin. In that case, a lot of those "chicken" cutlets are actually pork!
[1] WI-38 cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WI-38
[2] Tissue culture in roller bottles (yes, the medium is red at least for mammalian cells): https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-hgsfepq18i/images/stencil/12...