Key Point
- Cultured meat, also called cultured meat or cell-based meat, is made from animal cells.
- The company has created meatballs by inserting publicly available mammoth genetic information into sheep cells.
- Over 100 companies around the world are working on cultivated meat products.
Throw another mammoth at Barbie?
An Australian company has used the gene sequence of an extinct pachyderm to lift a glass cloche of meatballs made from lab-grown meat.
Tuesday’s launch at Amsterdam’s Science Museum was just days before April 1st, so there was an elephant in the room. Is this true?
“This is no April Fool’s joke,” says Tim Noakesmith, founder of Australian startup Vow.
“This is a true innovation.”
Cultured meat, also called cultured meat or cell-based meat, is made from animal cells. Livestock does not have to be killed to produce it. Proponents claim it’s good for the environment as well as animals.
Vow used publicly available genetic information from mammoths, filled in the missing pieces with the closest extant African elephant genetic data, and inserted it into sheep cells, Noakesmith said.
Given the right conditions in the lab, the cells grew to numbers large enough to curl into meatballs.
The world’s first mammoth meatball made from the DNA of an extinct giant has been unveiled at the Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands. sauce: AAP / Oath/cover image
Over 100 companies around the world are working on cultivated meat products, many of them startups like Vow.
Experts say the technology, if widely adopted, could significantly reduce the environmental impact of global meat production in the future.
Today, billions of acres of land are used for agriculture worldwide.
But don’t expect this to land on plates around the world anytime soon.
Vow hopes to launch its first product, farmed quail meat, by the end of the year.
Mammoth meatballs are a one-off, have never been tasted even by their creators, and are not planned for commercial production.
Instead, it was presented as a source of protein that got people talking about the future of meat.
“We wanted to excite people that the future of food could be different than it was before. I thought there was going to be a mammoth that would be a conversation piece and get people excited about this new future,” said Noakesmith.
“But the woolly mammoth has also traditionally been a symbol of loss. We now know that it has become extinct due to climate change. It was about seeing if we could make it, not just better for us, but better for the planet,” he added.
The jumbo meatballs on display in Amsterdam were about the size of a softball and a volleyball, were intended for display purposes, and were glazed to prevent breakage during transit from Sydney.
But when it was being prepared – slow grilled first, then finished with a blow torch on the outside – it smelled good.
“People who were there said the scent was similar to another prototype we made earlier, Crocodile,” said Noake Smith.
“So it’s fascinating to think that by adding protein from an animal that went extinct 4,000 years ago, we’ve got a completely unique and new scent that humans haven’t smelled in a long time. ”
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/this-meatball-isnt-just-mammoth-in-size-its-also-actual-mammoth-meat/d0ot7ns68 Australian company uses mammoth DNA to make meatballs
