A Data Warehouse of Muscle Characteristics and Beef Quality in France and A Demonstration of Potential Applications

Immortalizing Cells for Human Consumption

The need to produce immortal, food-relevant cell lines is one of the most pressing challenges of cellular agriculture, the field which seeks to produce meat and other animal products via tissue engineering and synthetic biology. Immortal cell lines have a long and complicated story, from the first recognized immortal human cell lines taken from Henrietta Lacks, to today, where they are used to assay toxicity and produce therapeutics, to the future, where they could be used to create meat without harming an animal. Although work in immortal cell lines began more than 50 years ago, there are few existing cell lines made of species and cell types appropriate for cultured meat. Cells in cultured meat will be eaten by consumers; therefore, cultured meat cell lines will also require unique attributes not selected for in other cell line applications. Specifically, cultured meat cell lines will need to be approved as safe for consumption as food, proliferate and differentiate efficiently at industrial scales, and have desirable taste, texture, and nutrition characteristics for consumers. This paper defines what cell lines are needed, the existing methods to produce new cell lines and their limitations, and the unique considerations of cell lines used in cultured meat.

Integrating biomaterials and food biopolymers for cultured meat production

Cultured meat has recently achieved mainstream prominence due to the emergence of societal and industrial interest. In contrast to animal-based production of traditional meat, the cultured meat approach entails laboratory cultivation of engineered muscle tissue. However, bioengineers have hitherto engineered tissues to fulfil biomedical endpoints, and have had limited experience in engineering muscle tissue for its post-mortem traits, which broadly govern consumer definitions of meat quality. Furthermore, existing tissue engineering approaches face fundamental challenges in technical feasibility and industrial scalability for cultured meat production. This review discusses how animal-based meat production variables influence meat properties at both the molecular and functional level, and whether current cultured meat approaches recapitulate these properties. In addition, this review considers how conventional meat producers employ exogenous biopolymer-based meat ingredients and processing techniques to mimic desirable meat properties in meat products. Finally, current biomaterial strategies for engineering muscle and adipose tissue are surveyed in the context of emerging constraints that pertain to cultured meat production, such as edibility, sustainability and scalability, and potential areas for integrating biomaterials and food biopolymer approaches to address these constraints are discussed. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: Laboratory-grown or cultured meat has gained increasing interest from industry and the public, but currently faces significant impediment to market feasibility. This is due to fundamental knowledge gaps in producing realistic meat tissues via conventional tissue engineering approaches, as well as translational challenges in scaling up these approaches in an efficient, sustainable and high-volume manner. By defining the molecular basis for desirable meat quality attributes, such as taste and texture, and introducing the fundamental roles of food biopolymers in mimicking these properties in conventional meat products, this review aims to bridge the historically disparate fields of meat science and biomaterials engineering in order to inspire potentially synergistic strategies that address some of these challenges.

Evaluation of Greek Cattle Carcass Characteristics (Carcass Weight and Age of Slaughter) Based on SEUROP Classification System

In Greece, all cattle carcasses produced from a variety of breed types are classified according to the SEUROP system. The objective of this study was to evaluate Greek carcass characteristics such as carcass weight and age of slaughter based on SEUROP classification system (muscle conformation and fat deposit classes) and to describe the effect of main factors such as breed, gender, year of slaughter, farm's geographical region and month of slaughter on these carcass parameters. It is the first study that evaluates local breeds, revealing the wide diversity of the Greek cattle breeding conditions. The analyzed records consisted of 323,046 carcasses from 2011 to 2017. All the examined factors significantly affected the mean carcass weight (298.9 ± 0.2 kg) and the mean slaughter age (559.1 ± 0.3 days). Carcasses from beef meat breeds had on average higher mean carcass weight while the local breeds had lower. The mean slaughter age and carcass weight were higher in winter than in summer. The local and the dairy breeds were classified in similar muscle conformation classes. Finally, Greek cattle carcasses from almost all regions were satisfactory for their quality carcass traits with good muscle conformation (R, O and U class) and low-fat deposit (class 1 to 3).

The Myth of Cultured Meat: A Review

To satisfy the increasing demand for food by the growing human population, cultured meat (also called in vitro, artificial or lab-grown meat) is presented by its advocates as a good alternative for consumers who want to be more responsible but do not wish to change their diet. This review aims to update the current knowledge on this subject by focusing on recent publications and issues not well described previously. The main conclusion is that no major advances were observed despite many new publications. Indeed, in terms of technical issues, research is still required to optimize cell culture methodology. It is also almost impossible to reproduce the diversity of meats derived from various species, breeds and cuts. Although these are not yet known, we speculated on the potential health benefits and drawbacks of cultured meat. Unlike conventional meat, cultured muscle cells may be safer, without any adjacent digestive organs. On the other hand, with this high level of cell multiplication, some dysregulation is likely as happens in cancer cells. Likewise, the control of its nutritional composition is still unclear, especially for micronutrients and iron. Regarding environmental issues, the potential advantages of cultured meat for greenhouse gas emissions are a matter of controversy, although less land will be used compared to livestock, ruminants in particular. However, more criteria need to be taken into account for a comparison with current meat production. Cultured meat will have to compete with other meat substitutes, especially plant-based alternatives. Consumer acceptance will be strongly influenced by many factors and consumers seem to dislike unnatural food. Ethically, cultured meat aims to use considerably fewer animals than conventional livestock farming. However, some animals will still have to be reared to harvest cells for the production of in vitro meat. Finally, we discussed in this review the nebulous status of cultured meat from a religious point of view. Indeed, religious authorities are still debating the question of whether in vitro meat is Kosher or Halal (e.g., compliant with Jewish or Islamic dietary laws).

Performance of fluorescence spectroscopy for beef meat authentication: Effect of excitation mode and discriminant algorithms

This study evaluated the performance of classical front face (FFFS) and synchronous (SFS) fluorescence spectroscopy combined with Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLSDA), Support Vector Machine associated with PLS (PLS-SVM) and Principal Components Analysis (PCA-SVM) to discriminate three beef muscles (Longissimus thoracis, Rectus abdominis and Semitendinosus). For the FFFS, 5 excitation wavelengths were investigated, while 6 offsets were studied for SFS. Globally, the results showed a good discrimination between muscles with Recall and Precision between 47.82 and 94.34% and Error ranging from 6.03 to 32.39%. For the FFFS, the PLS-SVM with the 382nm excitation wavelength gave the best discrimination results (Recall, Precision and Error of 94.34%, 89.53% and 6.03% respectively). For SFS, when performing discrimination of the three muscles, the 120nm offset gave the highest Recall and Precision (from 57.66% to 94.99%) and the lowest Error values (from 6.78 to 8.66%) whatever the algorithm (PLSDA, PLS-SVM and PCA-SVM).

Histological Characteristics, Fatty Acid Composition of Lipid Fractions, and Cholesterol Content of Semimembranosus and Triceps Brachii Muscles in Maremmana and Limousine Bovine Breeds

This study examined the histological properties of Semimembranosus and Triceps brachii muscle in two different bovine breeds, Maremmana (Ma) (an autochthonous breed from Tuscany, Italy) and Limousine (Lm). The animals were grazed in two adjoining pastures, received the same feed supplementation, and were weighed monthly. The experimental period lasted from weaning (6 months old) to slaughter (19 months old). Muscle samples were collected immediately after slaughter, before carcass cooling. Regarding the histological properties, the number of muscle fibers (TNF), mean sarcolemma perimeter (MSP), cross-sectional area, and total sarcolemma perimeter (TSP) were determined. Samples were also analyzed for proximate composition, fatty acid profile of total lipids (TLs), phospholipids (PLs), and neutral lipids (NLs), and for total cholesterol content. Breed was a significant variation factor for the performance parameter and histological muscle fiber properties. Interestingly, despite that Ma being a less extensively genetically improved breed than Lm, it showed higher weight at slaughter (+18%) and daily weight gain (+19%). Ma also showed smaller muscle fibers than Lm and, consequently, the TSP was higher. This difference affected the lipid fraction distribution (Lm was higher in PLs and lower in NLs than Ma) and, consequently, the fatty acid composition of TLs (Lm was high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, while Ma was high in monounsaturated fatty acids). The results of this experiment highlight the importance of environmental and management conditions on the full expression of genotypic potential.