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Will cell-based meat ever be a dinner staple?

Laboratory-grown meat has been stuck in the experimental stage. For it to become a commercially viable industry, tissue needs to be grown efficiently at scale.

The following is an excerpt from Nature.com

Will cell-based meat ever be a dinner staple? Laboratory-grown meat has been stuck in the experimental stage. For it to become a commercially viable industry, tissue needs to be grown efficiently at scale.

Meanwhile, other scientists hope to rally the research community around the idea of cell-based zebrafish fillets, at least as a vehicle for accelerating advances in the field. The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an established model organism for studying the genetic, neuronal and behavioural basis of disease. Alain Rostain, executive director of Clean Research, a non-profit organization in New York, now wants to make it the go-to species for basic-research projects in cellular agriculture as well. “There’s a lot of fundamental understanding that’s not there yet,” he says. “We need the participation of a lot of people to just think freely through the science together.”

And, as Rostain and his colleagues have described, researchers can benefit from the extensive molecular toolkit already established for zebrafish. Plus, as a lean fish with little fat content in the muscle, zebrafish fillets should be easier to produce than comparable lab-grown cuts of fat-laced salmon, tuna, beef or pork. Cultivated zebrafish will probably taste similar to white fish, such as cod or haddock, Rostain says, and discoveries made with zebrafish should translate to any other edible species.

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