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Artificial meat will be on the market in a few years
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
Creating a hamburger from cow stem cells is a long and complicated process, the cost of which, according to scientists, is almost 10 million rubles. But everything will change soon.
Taking muscle stem cells from a cow or a pig is a fairly simple procedure. The animal suffers virtually no harm. In the laboratory, these cells are placed in a special environment and fed with fetal serum - the plasma that remains in the blood after clots form. It is easy to guess that it is isolated from the body of an unborn fetus.
The result is small strips of tissue that are then stretched daily, mimicking the work of muscles and causing the future steak to grow. Unfortunately, the lack of blood and iron leaves the meat looking pale, not like your favorite sirloin. Researchers hope that supplementing with myoglobin, an iron-rich protein, can help solve this problem.
True, the staff of Maastricht University (Netherlands), working under the leadership of Mark Post, encountered another obstacle: pig muscle stem cells are capable of dividing only 20-30 times, and then the tissue stops growing. Fortunately, their colleagues and fellow countrymen from Utrecht University managed to show that it is possible to take other stem cells from pig muscles - so-called muscle progenitor cells, the population of which can increase from a thousand to several billion in a matter of months.
Another difficulty is that it is illegal to taste lab-grown meat, because it has been fed fetal serum, which can contain substances harmful to humans. So researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands are working on a synthetic substitute based on a certain type of aquatic bacteria.
If cultured meat can be perfected, the expensive process will migrate to the meatpacking plants of the future, where it will be done faster and cheaper. With the price of animal feed constantly rising, lab-grown meat could become a competitive alternative to beef, pork, and chicken in just a few years. And then it will save the world.