Tissue engineers are growing fake meat in vats from cell-cultures. Chicken Little, anyone?
However, you only need to establish a good blood supply if you want to grow thick slabs of muscle. Vladimir Mironov, director of the Shared Tissue Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston has other ideas. His team thinks the meat of the future will be a processed food closer to a sausage or hamburger.
In a detailed project proposal to NASA, he sets out how to grow cells on protein spheres suspended in growth medium. These could then be harvested and made into nuggets or patties.
His starting cells will be myoblasts, which normally live at the edges of muscle fibres and help repair the muscles if they are damaged. They are better suited than embryonic stem cells, Mironov says, because they are already part of the way down the road to forming the desired cell type, rather than being totally undifferentiated.
(Thanks, Stefan!)