Cell-based fish taste the same as their wild and farmed counterparts. But will it ever make economic...
The resulting lab-made meat, a mix of mostly muscle and fat cells, tastes similar to the live-caught version, but has none of the animal 'waste': no bones, no scales, no eyeballs.
Each seafood species has its own flavor, texture, and cell line that requires a unique set of parameters in which to grow.
Scientists must coax the cells to grow in higher volume, three-dimensional bioreactors, in which cells are suspended in their growth environment.
If researchers want to give the meat the texture of a fillet, they must coax the cells to combine and grow on edible scaffolds.
Developing cell lines, for example, can consume years of a company's early R&D budget, says Jennifer Lamy, who leads the Good Food Institute's alternative seafood efforts.
For Wildtype, a company developing sushi-grade salmon, it took three years to establish cell lines to the point where they could be grown in suspension in bioreactors, says co-founder Aryé Elfenbein.
In moving from glass plates to a bioreactor, Wildtype scientists initially used microcarriers, which are beads that provide a place for cells to attach in suspended cell culture, to help increase their viability.
From there the company transitioned to growing the cells in clusters, and finally to single-cell suspension.
"On a larger scale, controlling the environment isn't as easy, and sometimes the cells don't show the same properties as when they were at the smaller scale," says Ovissipour.
"The entire biopharma industry has been built on harvesting the proteins that cells produce and discarding the cells," says Kolbeck.