About This Project

The biggest barrier to making cultivated meat affordable is the prohibitive cost of fetal bovine serum and growth factors. In this proof of concept, we want to verify that microalgae produced growth factors can be integrated into a chemically defined medium to culture chicken cells. This way, my research hopes to create an alternative to fetal bovine serum, a common yet expensive media additive, to help in the proliferation and differentiation of chicken muscle satellite cells.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

I am a high school freshman investigating the potential of producing cheap growth factors from microalgae that can benefit cell culture communities. For context, when cultivating cells for lab grown meat, an additive called fetal bovine serum (FBS) is used to maintain cell growth with growth factors. However, the use of FBS raises regulatory concerns due to contamination and ethical worries, as it comes from cow fetuses. Our experiment hopes to validate and prove the possibility of using recombinant algae produced growth factors in culture medium used to cultivate lab grown meat. Epidermal Growth Factor which is a growth factor we plan to express in our vector has been successfully demonstrated in the algae C. Reinhardtii. Using the algae derived growth factors, we can create a chemically defined media without unknown proteins that is significantly cheaper, ethical, and safe than FBS.

What is the significance of this project?

Using algal-expressed growth factors, the costs of media can be drastically reduced, as algae grow quickly and pose a vastly lower contamination risk when compared to fetal bovine serum. Our project is significant because it provides a proof of concept that growth factors can be expressed in microalgae, serving as a way to produce ethical and safe cultivated meat. Basically, we will discover whether it is feasible to express growth factors in microalgae for lab grown meat. We want this experiment to be a pilot study observing the effects of this algal derived FBS replacement for lab grown meat and myotube formation. However, this experiment is not just for cultivated meat; FBS is used in nearly every cell culture practice ranging from vaccine production to cancer research. What this means is that the removal of FBS and replacement with algae derived mitogenic compounds reduces costs in many areas of tissue culture research, which in turn allows for more innovations.

What are the goals of the project?

We will use a plasmid encoding for the growth factors we want to express and insert it into a cell wall deficient stain of C. Reinhardtii algae in the chloroplasts. The transformation will be done with acid washed glass beads inside a vortex mixer suspended in polyethylene glycol. After the microalgae secrete enough growth factors, we will purify the proteins with a gravity his tag column. In order to evaluate whether our growth factors are bioactive, we will attempt to cultivate chicken muscle satellite cells using the secreted growth factors and observe morphological characteristics to assess success. Furthermore, a ELISA will be ordered to measure any secreted growth factors.