Modelling the growth of in-vitro meat on microstructured edible films

Abstract

In-vitro meat is an emerging technology that involves the production of edible muscles using skeletal muscle tissue engineering avoiding in this way the slaughter of farmed animals. In the field of in-vitro meat production, it is important to tune appropriately the cell growth phase to obtain sufficient high biomass prior to entering to cell differentiation (nonproliferative stage). Moreover, the understanding of the kinetics associated with myoblast cell growth is necessary for scaling-up the production through the use of bioreactors. In this work, the growth of myoblasts paralleled aligned into an edible micropatterned film mimicking muscle fiber was modelled using the cubic Moser equation, where the oxygen diffusion into microchannels was calculated using a mass transfer approach. The availability of oxygen in contact with the muscle cells was lower in microchannels compared to a flat surface. These results demonstrate that microchannels offer to limit oxygen substrate to cultivate in-vitro meat. The results were consistent with observations of the cell growth onto two kinds of micropatterned edible films, which were fabricated using non-mammalian gelatin, alginate, agarose and glycerol or sorbitol as plasticizers, all of them already used as edible additives in the food industry.