Abstract
The world population is growing and alternative ways of satisfying the increasing demand for meat are being explored, such as using animal cells for the fabrication of cultured meat. Edible biomaterials are required as supporting structures. Hence, we chose agarose, gellan and a xanthan-locust bean gum blend (XLB) as support materials with pea and soy protein additives and analyzed them regarding material properties and biocompatibility. We successfully built stable hydrogels containing up to 1% pea or soy protein. Higher amounts of protein resulted in poor handling properties and unstable gels. The gelation temperature range for agarose and gellan blends is between 23–30 °C, but for XLB blends it is above 55 °C. A change in viscosity and a decrease in the swelling behavior was observed in the polysaccharide-protein gels compared to the pure polysaccharide gels. None of the leachates of the investigated materials had cytotoxic effects on the myoblast cell line C2C12. All polysaccharide-protein blends evaluated turned out as potential candidates for cultured meat. For cell-laden gels, the gellan blends were the most suitable in terms of processing and uniform distribution of cells, followed by agarose blends, whereas no stable cell-laden gels could be formed with XLB blends.
Highlights
Global meat production is on the rise in an effort to satisfy the dramatically increased meat consumption of a growing world population [1]
We investigated the influence of pea and soy protein isolates on the stability and the rheological properties of hydrogels from agarose, gellan and xanthan-locust bean gum blend (XLB)
As mentioned earlier, cultured meat products are being developed to address the various environmental issues associated with conventional meat production
Summary
Global meat production is on the rise in an effort to satisfy the dramatically increased meat consumption of a growing world population [1]. Out of the numerous different hydrogel materials and blends, only a few are edible, widely available and animal-free Some of these edible, plant-based candidates have already been approved by food safety authorities and are used in the food industry. Agar/agarose, gellan gum (gellan) and xanthan-locust bean gum blend (XLB) are approved as food additives and have been successfully used in different studies to investigate the mouse myoblast cell line C2C12 [24,25,26]. Those polysaccharides can form stable, predominantly tasteless hydrogels with tunable properties, but they have hardly any nutritional value [27]. We examined the cytotoxicity of these blends by testing leachates of the hydrogels on the myoblast model cell line C2C12 and by encapsulating these cells into the hydrogels
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