Canada has grown a new form of laboratory meat

McMaster University researchers have developed a new form of laboratory meat using a method that will offer an alternative to traditional animal meat with a more similar texture and taste.

Researchers Ravi Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shaheen-Shamsabadi, both from the University's School of Bioengineering, have proposed a way to create meat by assembling thin sheets of cultured muscle and fat cells, which are also grown in the laboratory.

Sheets of living cells, which are comparable in thickness to paper, are first grown in a test tube and then concentrated on growth plates, removed and stacked together. Before the cells die, the leaves have time to "stick together".

When folding sheets, you can form a piece of any thickness. and saturate it with fat in a certain percentage ratio, which is an advantage over other alternatives.

As scientists describe in the journal Cells Tissues Organs, they managed to create meat from available lines of mouse cells. Although they did not eat the mouse meat described in the research paper, they later created and cooked a sample of meat made from rabbit cells.

"To the touch and to the taste, it was like ordinary meat," says Selvaganapathy.