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Australian food startup creates meatballs made from mammoth DNA

Remains of woolly mammoths, with fur and tissue still intact, are regularly found buried in Arctic permafrost. Their discovery allowed scientists to sequence the mammoth genome and learn intriguing details about the lives of these extinct Ice Age giants.

Now some of that information is being used to grow a species of mammoth meat in the lab.

A vow, an Australian lab-grown meat startup, has made what it describes as a mammoth meatball. The aim of the project, according to the company, is to draw attention to the potential of cultured meat to make food more ecological. On Tuesday, the meatball joins the collection of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave – a museum of science and medicine in the Netherlands.

“We need to start rethinking how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is […] that many more people around the world start hearing about cultured meat,” said James Ryall, Chief Scientific Officer at Vow.

Creating “Mammoth Meat”

In a wonderfully wacky publicity stunt, meatballs are not intended for human consumption. And even calling the creation mammoth meat is a bit of a stretch. The food is more like lab-grown lamb mixed with a small amount of mammoth DNA.

The scientists working on the project didn’t have access to a frozen stockpile of mammoth tissue to base their efforts on. Instead, they focused on a mammalian protein called myoglobin, which gives meat its texture, color and flavor, by identifying the mammoth version’s DNA sequence in a publicly available genome database.

They filled in gaps in the gigantic myoglobin DNA sequence using information from the genome of an African elephant. The scientists inserted the synthesized gene into a sheep muscle cell, which was then grown in the laboratory.

The team managed to produce around 400 grams of mammoth meat.

“From a genomic point of view, it’s just one gene among all the other sheep genes that is gigantic,” said Ernst Wolvetang, professor and senior group leader at the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland, who was part of the project. . “It’s one gene in 25,000.”

Ryall said that mammoth myoglobin changed the physical appearance of sheep muscle cells. Although our Stone Age ancestors hunted and presumably feasted on mammoths, Ryall and Wolvetang said they didn’t taste the meatballs.

“Normally, we would try our products and play with them. But we are hesitant to try it right away because we are talking about a protein that has not existed for 5,000 years. I have no idea what the potential allergenicity of this particular protein might be,” Ryall said.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re not offering it as a product. It will not go on sale because we have no idea of ​​the safety profile of that particular product,” he added.

Lab meat vs real meat

Advocates hope that cultured meat will reduce the need to slaughter animals for food and help tackle the climate crisis. The food system is responsible for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, most resulting from livestock.

Vow hopes to soon obtain regulatory approval in Singapore, the first country to approve cultured meat, to sell its lab-grown quail meat. In the United States, the FDA has said that lab-raised chicken is fit for human consumption.

The carcasses of mammoths, which went extinct some 5,000 years ago, were found so well preserved in the permafrost that they still had blood in their veins.

Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at the Center for Paleogenetics at Stockholm University, who sequenced the world’s oldest mammoth DNA, knows what mammoth meat tastes like.

During a field trip to the Yana River in Siberia in 2012, Dalén said he tasted a small piece of frozen meat taken from part of the carcass of a mammoth calf. Although he said he didn’t see much scientific value in the meatball project if they were offered for sale, Dalén said he would definitely try one.

“Without a doubt I would love to try this!” he said. “It can’t taste worse than real mammoth meat.”

Source: CNN Brasil

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